HYDRONE AB3

Hydrone AB3 represents the third year of UCL’s participation in the Shell Eco-marathon 2016 (SEM), an event held in London to encourage students to pursue innovation in renewable energy sources for automotive applications. The race consists of 8 laps of 2.2 km each which must be completed in under 43 minutes and where teams are ranked based on fuel efficiency.  It was decided early on that a completely novel design would replace last year’s aluminium chassis with a full carbon fibre monocoque. A total of 5 designs were produced and scrutinised by way of finite element analysis (FEA) in the CATIA Analysis workbench. A new steering system has been designed to reliably and effectively direct the moving vehicle without notably increasing the resistance to motion. The steering design was an iterative process that, above all, CATIA for kinematic simulation and clash detection to ensure the system’s accuracy, functionality and ability to successfully integrate into the vehicle assembly. The full range of the parts were arranged in the assembly before the drawing workbench was used to create fully dimensioned technical drawings with which the components can be manufactured in our workshop.