Today we’d like to introduce you to Gigi Rill.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Gigi. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Rice Electric Vehicle Team (REV) is a student-run organization that designs and constructs electric powered vehicles and enters national efficiency car competitions.
This interdisciplinary group of students represents all academic years and over ten different majors at Rice University. Rice Undergraduates participate in a large-scale, multidisciplinary design project, enabling them to gain hands-on experience in topics outside their major and work alongside students from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds. This club also provides an opportunity to practice teamwork, leadership, collaboration, and professional skills.
The team participated in its first competition in spring 2012 at the Shell Eco-Marathon Americas (SEMA), an international competition which scores vehicles based on their energy efficiency. The RSC Enterprise placed at an impressive second in the Solar Prototype category. The Rice Electric Vehicle team hopes to continue serving as a tangible application and example of the engineering excellence at Rice University.
We will be competing at the Shell Eco Marathon this April in Sonoma California.
Has it been a smooth road?
Engineering design is an iterative process. You come up with a design, prototype it, test it, and finally determine whether it is sufficient to what you need or not. The challenges we’ve come across stem from this process of exploring the different paths in engineering.
Specifically, since we are racing in a competition the limitations of the competition rules create engineering challenges that we need to accommodate in our design. This year we had to switch our type of brake system which led to a complete overhaul of the suspension system.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Our club is unique in that we focus as much on the engineering result as the process. We chose to compete in the Shell Eco Marathon Urban Electric Division, a competition that creates a “street legal” energy efficient car, because we want to not only make an energy efficient car but also make the technology accessible to a wider variety of people. Our car is designed around the driver because in the end the driver is the user of the vehicle.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
You might think that the gas capitol of the United States would be a hostile environment to run an electric vehicle team, but actually the industry has been very supportive to our endeavors. The competition we’ve been competing in is actually sponsored by Shell. Overall Houston has a very high concentration of engineers who have a wide variety of backgrounds and we’ve been able to tap into some of that for some technical mentoring.
Contact Info:
- Website: revteam.blogs.rice.edu
- Email: riceelectricvehicle@gmail.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/riceelectricvehicle/
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