There are many well known student design teams at the University of Waterloo, such as the Solar Car Team, UWAFT, Formula SAE, etc. One of the lesser known teams within the Mechanical Engineering Department is the Clean Snowmobile Team, which takes a stock snowmobile chassis and engine, and redesigns the sled to reduce noise and emissions, two major concerns with snowmobiles today. Currently the team is preparing to go to Houghton, Michigan in March for the SAE Clean Snowmobile Competition to compete in the Internal Combustion category.
Taking a sled to competition is no small task. The sled that will be entered in the competition must conform to all the rules and regulations, which has already meant hours of hard work in the snowmobile room, and there will be more hours of work to come. To ensure that the sled is ready for competition and will work reliably and efficiently during the events, the sled will be hooked up to a dynamometer for initial testing and tuning. The final stage in testing is, of course, taking the sled out on the trails! This will not only ensure once and for all that the sled is working well, but will also give the team a chance to drive the sled, as most of us had little or no experience with snowmobiles before joining the team.
The sled that is going to competition in March is the sled that was taken to competition in 2009, despite not running at the time. This year our goal is to not only have a working sled, but to also have the BEST sled at the competition. This goal has presented several interesting challenges – first and foremost, the competition rules have been changed this year. In the past, there was a cap on the engine capacity of the sleds entered in the IC category. This year the cap on engine capacity has been removed, and instead there is a cap on the maximum horsepower that the sled can have – only 130hp. This has required the UW team to remove the turbocharger and related parts from the sled, since the engine will produce approximately 120hp without the turbocharger. The other major change this year is that the competition will focus less on the performance of the sleds, and more on the environmental aspects, i.e. noise reduction and emission reduction.
Looking ahead to 2011, the team has purchased a chassis for modification and has already started working on designing the various components. There is always work to be done in the team room, so if you are interested in joining a student team but are not sure what to do, I would highly recommend checking out the Snowmobile Team! Check out our old website at http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~sled/ (an amazing new website is in the works), or drop by the team room, E3-2103B, anytime the door is open.
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