Conant students win first place for electric vehicle

Within a matter of months, students at Conant High School in Hoffman Estates successfully converted a gasoline go-cart into an award-winning electric vehicle.

Members of the school's Engineering and Electronics Club attended an electric vehicle competition at Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Mich., on May 5 and drove home with two first place trophies for presentation and onboard electronics and engineering.

Last summer, the group was awarded a $5,000 grant to design and build a one-of-a-kind electric vehicle. The grant came from the Square One Education Network, a nonprofit organization that provides funds to students from kindergarten to 12th grade who are interested in exploring science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Since September, each student dedicated about 100 hours to engineering, designing and constructing the vehicle.

"I think they set the bar extremely high for themselves," said Peter Goss, applied technology teacher at Conant and the club's faculty adviser. "I would have been happy just going there and having the car run."

Goss said this was the first year Conant participated in the event and that he has plans to reapply for the grant for 2013.

Between 25 and 30 students - including members of the school's auto club - worked on the project and 19 went to the competition, where students from 13 other Midwestern high schools were present.

Sophomore Mikey Mayers and senior Devansh Solanki said they, along with other members of the club, put extra hours into building the vehicle on Saturdays, during winter and spring break and, in the weeks leading up to the competition, before and after school each day.

"We really liked the idea of having this project because it really allows us to do something more than we usually do," Solanki said. "With this, it was a project you had to keep building on each time."

One of the first changes the students made was removing the gas engine and replacing it with six lithium iron phosphate batteries that were divided into two separate parallels.

"We used that because it was the most reliable for us," Solanki said, adding that the batteries worked better than regular car batteries because they weighed much less and only took about 13 minutes to charge. "If one battery failed, only that parallel failed."

To make the vehicle more aerodynamic, they made a body, layering what started off as a skeleton of metal with cardboard, aluminum foil and fiberglass.

"We just did a lot of general research, Googling things. After we Googled them, we found more reliable sources," Mayers said, adding that he got a lot of ideas from similar competitions at the college level.

One of its unique features was a custom dashboard that the students designed and manufactured with help from a 3-D printer. They eliminated measurements like RPM and added gadgets like a voltage meter and GPS unit.

There was also an onboard computer that read and transmitted real time data about the condition of the batteries back to the pit area and a live video feed from the driver's point of view that anyone with access to the Internet could watch.

Other accessories were installed in order to meet the competition's safety criteria, such as a roll cage, a fire extinguisher and a five-point harness. The driver was also required to wear a helmet.

At the competition, the students had a chance to showcase their vehicle on three different tracks - an oval, figure eight and one with multiple turns - with the goal of going the farthest distance in 20 minutes.

The vehicle's top speed was around 27 miles per hour and the distance it traveled averaged around 3.5 miles on each track.

"We did relatively well, being a first-year group," Solanki said.

Faculty adviser Goss said the club was lucky to have Jim Atwood, an engineer at Northrop Grumman Corp. in Rolling Meadows and a friend of a Conant science teacher, volunteer to help the students when they met after school twice a week for three hours, as he helped keep them on task and focus their ideas.

Still, the club took the lead.

"The students really did do 99 percent of the work," Goss said, adding their dedication was impressive.

Mayers said he appreciated having Goss as a mentor. "He was great because he didn't do the project for us," Mayers said. "He's definitely a great person to work with."

Solanki, who will be attending the University of Illinois in the fall to study engineering, said the competition was one of the favorite moments of his high school years.

"Being a senior, you have a lot of memories from high school but this one probably tops it all up because of how grand it was. Not many people can say, 'I got to walk on a NASCAR speedway.'"