As many other events and competitions, the Solar Splash 2020 competition has been cancelled for the year due to Covid-19. The teams participating this year were disappointed, however, they still held their heads high and appreciated the experience of working towards the competition. There is one team in particular that we wanted to highlight today and that is the University of New Mexico (UNM) Solar Boat team!
The team put out a little article detailing their reactions and reflections about the Solar Splash 2020 cancellation. The article is titled “Dreams dashed but lessons still learned despite cancellation of student design competitions.”
What is Solar Splash?
Solar Splash is an event that brings together colleges from the U.S mostly but also from abroad. It requires the colleges and their teams to build solar boats that must undergo a series of challenges to brand one a winner! The goal of the competition is to find the teams that can best exploit the sun in a small watercraft. The duration of the event is five days during typically the second week of June. Its purpose is testing workmanship, endurance, speed and resourcefulness. There are multiple races/challenges as well.
The UNM Solar Splash team has been participating in the competition for the last few years. Last year they finished fourth place overall, third place in the solar slalom event and also won the Teamwork Award for best coordinated group effort in 2019.
Solar Splash 2020 Cancellation
Trey Alexanderson, a solar array subteam member of this year’s team, describes in the article how the “the team had made a variety of improvements to the boat for 2020, including building a new wooden hull that was designed, built and about to be tested by the team.” The new boat is made out of quarter-inch plywood and coated in fiberglass and is “an ultra low-drag wavesplitter design, with its shape determined by a student team that conducted both numerical modeling and small-scale validation experiments.”
Peter Vorobieff, whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting at the 2018 Solar Splash competition, is a professor of mechanical engineering and head of UNM’s Solar Splash. In the article, he said that “some of the members of the current team will continue as graduate students and are planning to compete in the 2021 contest.”
Despite the hardships and the cancellation, the UNM Solar Splash team is grateful for their experience of learning how to build and operate a solar boat. They appreciate the knowledge shared by their peers and professors and those not graduating look forward to next year’s competition.
Link to the original article: https://news.unm.edu/news/dreams-dashed-but-lessons-still-learned-despite-cancellation-of-student-design-competitions
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