UI students preparing for Clean Snowmobile Challenge

Written by Kevin Wickersham -Argonaut
Friday, 03 March 2006

It’s almost spring, and the 18 student members of the Clean Snowmobile Challenge team are once again preparing to compete.

For the sixth time, the University of Idaho will enter the Society of Automotive Engineers’ national competition, which seeks to develop environmentally friendly snowmobiles. The competition will be take place March 13-18 at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Mich. Sixteen university teams from the United States and Canada will be participating in the competition, which the UI team won in both 2002 and 2003.
According to contest guidelines, the goal of the competition is to design snowmobiles which are “quiet, (and) emit significantly less unburned hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide than current production snowmobiles, without significantly increasing oxides of nitrogen emissions.” The snowmobiles are also supposed to be cost-effective and comfortable to drive. Teams are judged in a variety of events that rate, among other things, emissions, noise, performance and appearance.

Andy Findlay, a graduate student in mechanical engineering and CSC team member, said that the team is aiming for both a “solution that surpasses the goals of the competition” and an “industry solution that still revolves around the two-stroke platform.”

Karen DenBraven, professor of mechanical engineering and the faculty adviser for the team, said the team is trying to provide a clean snowmobile that, first and foremost, limits emissions, is fuel-economic and makes less noise.
To do this, the team is adopting a set of standards not normally used for snowmobiles. Rather than shooting to surpass environmental standards designed for snowmobiles by the Environmental Protection Agency, Findlay said that the team instead is aiming to meet standards used to regulate the emissions of outboard boat motors, because they are much more strict.

Perhaps the most important innovation by the team is the use of a gasoline direct-injected two-stroke engine platform. Findlay said that while many of the other teams taking part in the competition are using four-stroke engine platforms — more mechanically complex but easier to make clean — the UI CSC team has chosen to utilize the two-stroke engine, which is simpler in design than its four-stroke counterpart but does not sacrifice in the areas of power and performance. The main innovation in their engine design is that fuel is injected into the cylinder at an optimal time to prevent fuel loss.

“Direct injection waits until the exhaust port is covered to inject the fuel so that there is no short-circuiting of fuel, which causes poor fuel economy and emissions,” said Findlay. “(Better) fuel economy allows the tank to be smaller, and allows people to ride longer on less gas.”

Findlay said the team is also using direct oil injection in its engine design. The injection system precisely controls the amount of oil being injected into the engine, preventing it from burning more oil than is needed. This is important, said Findlay, because the system reduces emissions created by the burning of excess oil and increases the overall oil economy of the engine.

“The point of oil injection is to use exactly what we need and no more,” DenBraven said.

One of the major focuses of the team’s sound-reduction efforts centers on the air intake system, which Findlay said “can be very loud.” To reduce sound emissions from the air intake, the team has incorporated a diffuser that “cancels the compression waves that exit through the air intake system on top,” said Erik Van Patten, a senior mechanical engineering student and one of the two captains of the UI CSC team. The design for the diffuser was Van Patten’s senior project this year.

In addition to the diffuser, the team is also using a muffler and catalytic converter on the exhaust system and sound-absorbing insulation throughout the design to further reduce detrimental noise emissions.

“The two-stroke engine is inherently loud, so it requires a lot of experimentation,” said Nathan Bradbury, a graduate student and team mentor, adding that noise reduction is one of the team’s weak points this year because the major impetus of their research has been in the area of engine development.
Despite this, Findlay said the UI CSC team has a very strong chance to win this year’s competition.

“We have a much better design than a lot of other teams out there,” he said. “We have a really great chance at winning this.”

Win or lose, Findlay said that the competition and the hands-on experience it gives students is important. The competition also helps students to understand team dynamics and cooperation.

“If you are interested in working in the (snowmobile) industry, this opens a lot of doors,” he said.

http://www.argonaut.uidaho.edu/content/view/1323/48/

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