After a multi-year hiatus, the AIChE UH Chem-E-Car team competed at the 2025 regional competition this past spring, earning them an invitation to return to compete in the final international competition in Boston, Massachusetts, where they ran against teams from across the continent and placed 23rd overall.
AIChE’s Chem-E Car Competition requires team members to “design and construct a chemically powered vehicle within certain size constraints that must travel a specified distance.” The vehicle must operate safely, using only chemical processes to run and stop, with prizes awarded for “traveling the correct distance, for creativity, and more.”
“I think that as a team, it was really quite surreal,” said team captain and electrical engineering student Evan Castillo. “We hadn’t done this as a university in about 10 years, and Cesar and I had never really done anything like this in our lives.”
“Just qualifying for the regional competition was surreal in itself,” agreed chemical team lead and chemical engineering student Cesar Gonzalez. “The challenges we faced, realizing that we actually did qualify, and then showing up to that international stage at the AIChE conference last year and realizing that we had made it and were competing with teams from around the world was a very surreal but also very great moment.”
The constraints of the competition were the same as the ones the team faced at regionals, but they did make some key changes to their setup and the way it performed.
“We changed a little bit of the chemistry and found that, going into internationals, we felt a lot more confident than we ever even did at regionals,” said Castillo.
“We were able to learn a lot from our challenges at that regional level, when we were primarily concerned with getting the car to work in the first place; going into that international level, we were focused on optimizing the design to make it run as well as it could,” Gonzalez added.
Their preparedness paid off, too: although a crucial component of their car’s final setup fell prey to FedEx shipping delays at the final destination, the team went prepared with backup supplies in their suitcases as a contingency plan.
“The car might not have run as perfectly as it would have with fresher materials, but it still ran, and even with all of that happening we were still about to run the car and get 23rd place overall. I thought it was really great that we were able to do that, and that nothing too crazy happened complication-wise due to those missing materials,” said Castillo.
Now the team is once again preparing for the next regional competition coming up later this spring. New competition constraints mean a new car design, and Castillo predicts that “this one will be a lot tougher.”
Last year’s regional competition took place at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Monterrey, Nuevo León. This year, regionals will be held at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, and he anticipates more competition.
“We’re really excited,” Gonzalez said. “We’re more or less harnessing thermal energy — heat — and converting it to electrical power. That idea has really been clicking with us, so we’re slowly figuring things out and trying to make them work as best as we can for this upcoming regional run.”
The multidisciplinary approach to the Chem-E Car competition is more important than ever this year as the team works to flesh out the electrical systems and components at play in their new design.
“There’s a lot more that goes into the Chem-E Car than just being chemical engineers,” said Gonzalez.