The biennial Worlds Solar Challenge starts in Darwin on 18 October and travels across country to Adelaide.
In this competition there will participate different futuristic cars powered by the Sun. The idea of this competition is to promote the research on solar-powered cars with the willing of make those cars become, in the future, a consumer product.
In this race there are several categories: challenger class (for one person cars) and cruiser class (for two seater class). Most teams are from universities but there are also teams from schools, such as Goko hig school in Japan.
Each team trusts his victory on a different factor, there are teams that get more concentrated on the aerodynamics, others on the efficiency of the solar panels. They can do the car as they want but they have to accomplish the condition that their cars are only allowed to store maximum 5k Wh of energy at a time, thus they have to obtain the rest of the energy from the Sun or from the motion of the car.
This year the IBM team will implement on his solar powered car a software that reports his driver all the weather conditions with extreme accuracy and precision. This is combined with cloud motion data from sky cameras and satellite observations and multiple other sophisticated weather prediction models. This new technology can offer forecasts with a 30% more accuracy than conventional ones. That will aloud to know where the clouds are, where they are going, and where the car should go faster in order to chase the Sun.
Opinion: this event goes forward than a simple race, it's not just that, it's a way to try new technologies in the motoring engineering. Any of the ideas the different teams that participate in the race can be applicable to the commercial cars or useful to it's development. Great brands of car's manufacture as Ford invest a lot of resources to find out sustainable ways of make cars run.
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