The smell of burning rubber, the roar of the crowd and the insatiable desire to win are all a part of racecar driving. While there is no pit crew for the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) ChemE Car Competition, the excitement is still there for chemical engineering majors Mansour AbdulBaki and Adrian Morales, the first University of Houston students to ever enter the competition.
AbdulBaki and Morales competed at the Georgia Institute of Technology and captured a second-place finish. Though they have not received an official invitation to the national competition, which will take place at the 2004 AIChE Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas, they are both hoping for a trip to the state capital this fall.
“We want to go out there and prove that we’re good; we have a good program, good students, and a good department,” Morales said.
Because the national meeting will be held in Austin, all entrants from Texas had to compete in other regions. AbdulBaki and Morales competed in the Southern Region rather than the Southwest Region, which is composed of the entire state of Texas.
These juniors have spent the better part of a year constructing a miniature car that draws its energy from a chemical reaction. More precisely, the car must carry a predetermined weight over a particular distance, and then come to a stop.
Their car, which obtains its energy from a fuel cell reaction, was altered less than two weeks before the competition due to a last-minute revision of the regulations, but they said that it made their car more environmentally friendly.
“We start with distilled water,” Morales said. “We place a solar panel on top of a projector, because solar intensity is not always constant, especially in Houston. The energy obtained from this is used to electrolyze water to split it into hydrogen and oxygen. Whenever we’re done, we have a certain amount of hydrogen for how far we think it’s going to run. Then we hook up the motor and let the hydrogen and oxygen combine again, so our only waste product is water.”
By initiating UH involvement with this competition, AbdulBaki and Morales are attempting to effect change at the local level and within the university by enticing more chemical engineering majors to become involved with AIChE. AbdulBaki served as the organization’s president last term, and Morales is the current vice president, and they want to see it expand.
“We’re trying to get AIChE more involved on campus and at the national level and make this competition an annual thing,” AbdulBaki said. “We won’t be able to do this next year, but we want new people to take the idea and go to nationals to show that we’re still out there. There are other competitions, but this competition sparks more of an interest in students. The others are quite a task and something to be proud of, but it doesn’t get quite as much attention as something people see moving right in front of them.”