Steam Car Success!

This past Monday, after hours and hours of work on our model steam car, we were finally able to showcase all of our hard work. Writing the project report describing the processes involved in building the car and the problems we encountered along the way was not exciting, actually running the car in competition was a blast!

However, after checking the car over and taking 2nd in the fastest start-up competition, we encountered a problem with friction when we set the car down to race. Our boiler a

nd turbine system was working wonderfully, getting the front wheel spinning at a considerable rate, but when the first heat started and we put the front wheel down, it slowed down considerably and the car moved at a much slower rate than we had gotten it to move in previous test runs. As a result of this, we took second in the first heat. At first we thought the front wheel, because it was initially spinning so fast, was slipping on the concrete. But after watching more closely during the second heat, in which we also took second, we realized this was not the case, that instead there was friction somewhere which we had not eliminated.

After taking a closer look at the car, we discovered the plastic tubes holding the back wheels onto the axle had somehow been tightened. After loosening these and oiling up the axles once again, the car ran as smoothly and as fast as ever and we won the 3rd heat by a fairly wide margin. Unfortunately, although our car had certainly proved itself to be the fastest, we did not advance to the finals because of the way the competition was structured. But we did run our car concurrently with the final race and were pleased to discover that, had we been in the race, our car would have won by a fair margin.

The extra speed our car displayed, once we fixed the friction problem, I think was due to two heat shields (not pictured) we placed over the boiler which helped to trap the heat and therefore heat the water to a greater temperature and eject the steam at a faster rate. This resulted in a faster-spinning turbine and ultimately in a faster car. For this modification, we received the runner-up award for best modification as well as several other awards based on the appearance of our car, which we had painted red and black.

Overall, our model steam car project was a success in which we were able to solve problems in the moment and implement a few good ideas in order to improve the car and make it our own.