104: ChemE Car

For over twenty-five years, AIChE has organized its annual international competition for collegiate students, called the AIChE Chem-E Car competition. In this competition, students create a shoebox-sized car powered by chemical reactions that can travel between fifteen and thirty meters within two minutes. In past years, students from the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering competed in this competition. This year, we improved the previous team’s car. Though we didn’t attend the competition, we still kept the AIChE rules in mind.

The car includes a reactor system, integration system, stop reaction and chassis. Our reactor system contained a hot reactor with a high concentration of strong acid and base, a cold reactor with an ethylene glycol and water mixture and sixteen TEGs placed between the two reactors. The TEGs generated voltage to power the car, which we sent to the integration system and motor. We revised the integration system to calculate the gear RPMs, monitor reactor temperatures, and signal the motor to shut off when the stop reaction changed from white to black. We specifically used an iodine clock reaction as the stop mechanism. We placed all these components on a new chassis with a modified design incorporating engineering mechanics.

Improving the previous team’s car helped us deeply understand the Chem-E Car process, which we now explain to non-engineers to showcase what chemical engineers do.