ABOUT
It’s really simple; we are a group of university students from varied engineering disciplines who share our knowledge, team spirit and expertise to come up with a chemically powered car – The Chem-E Car!
We are always redesigning our car’s stopping mechanism and power source by incorporating electrochemistry, electronics, and reaction kinetics.
Check out our various pages and keep an eye out for updates on our project.
History
The idea of having a McGill Chem-E Car Design Team started in the summer of 2013 when David Villegas brought a group of his fellow McGill chemical engineering students together with the goal of participating in the AIChE Chem-E Car competition. Those involved started researching reactions for power source and stopping mechanism, playing with microcontrollers, and designing the body of the car. As the year progressed, the Chem-E Car design idea was made into a reality thanks to the support of various organisations, sponsors, and the faculty of engineering at McGill University. After overcoming many unexpected problems, and many hours of calibrating the reaction, the McGill Chem-E Car Team made its way to their very first appearance at the AIChE Chem-E Car – Northeast Regional Competition. The competition was hosted by the University of Connecticut at the end of March 2014. The team placed 6th out of 14, an excellent first showing!
Since then the team has constantly improved the car to keep qualifying for the Northeast Regionals Competition and has made it to the Nationals Competition twice! The team placed 1st in the Nationals competition in 2015! In 2017, the team was invited to the 10th annual World Conference of Chemical Engineering where it participated in the World Chem-E Car Competition in Barcelona, Spain! In April 2018, the team placed 2nd at the Regionals Competition, thus qualifying to the 2018 Nationals Competition held in Pittsburgh!
Visions and Goals
Our vision is to build a team structure that will increase involvement of chemical engineering students, as well as students from other departments and faculties in large team-based design projects.
Our goals include:
- – Fostering innovative thinking and teamwork throughout the project design process
- – Developing strong management, organizational, and leadership skills through collaboration among different sub-teams
- – Encouraging student research and experimental design
- – Practicing the highest lab safety standards
- – Developing our own data acquisition device and calibration techniques
Our vision can be summarized in one acronym
This Year
This Academic year is a big one for the team! Having qualified for Nationals, the team is improving the Regional’s 2018 car for an aim to win Nationals. Currently, the team is working on optimizing the soluble lead flow battery and the iodine clock reaction for our stopping mechanism. As for Regionals, the team wants to try new stopping mechanism alternatives such as crystal violet bleaching. We hope to achieve a new design for a greater success at UMass of Amherst in April 2019!