Team Acid Rain Blog

A great little video about algae as a source for biofuels here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ToojK_MJd0

Upon our return to Ireland the madness didnt end there!

After so many interviews in Paris we mistakenly thought it would end there!

not so!

Last week I, (Brian Byrne, team captain),  did two radio interviews.

One with Liffey Sound FM - website : www.liffeysound.com, a localWest Dublin radio station

and one with KFM, (Kildare radio), www.kfmradio.com

 We also, as a team, did an interview with TV3 on the popular program Ireland AM.

This tv show features each morning on weekdays with two highlights of the week on a Saturday and a Sunday. We featured again on the weekly highlights!!!

To summarise we have been on radio twice and TV 3 times since coming home !!

The Car has finally made it home! 

 It is currently being checked over by a garage and its not looking good. Apparently the ball joint that snapped has caused problems with the steering rack which may explain the pulling to the left. Hopefully it just needs to be tracked otherwise it may be scrapped!!

 The car still managed to make a TV appearance with the help of Hyland recovery!

It featured on the programme "Ireland AM" on TV3 yesterday morning!

The vehicle we used to drive from Dublin to Paris was a direct injection turbo diesel with an intercooler.

Its capacity is 2 litres and is a 4 cylinder engine.

The vechicle puts out 128bhp and  213 ft/lb of torque.

Diesel smoke tests while running on vegetable oil before our trip yielded an excellent average result of 0.73! Not bad for a 10 year old car!

We got 46miles per gallon while driving from Dublin to Paris mostly at motorway speed. Bear in mind this was with a suspension breaking heavy load!

This was on rapeseed oil given to us by our sponsors:

The journey used less than  one tank of fuel! Again not bad for a ten year old car!

Mind you the car was not in perfect order before we set off on the trip. We serviced the car before we left doing everything ourselves except the oil change (we had no way of disposing of the used engine oil). 

In fact the engine oil we used was given to us by Ecocar.ie the oil was made from plant oil!!

 We also had to replace a headlight before we setoff! The original headlight would not align so I ordered a new one and fitted it. One slight problem.....the headlight was factory wired wrong!! Since we had no time to send it back and wait for a replacement I rewired it myself !!

This is a photo of the car just a few days before the trip to Paris(note we didnt have the logos on until the last minute )!! While we worked on the headlight we managed to leave a tool under the hood which jammed the bonnet shut!

We lost half a day of work trying to prize open the bonnet!! Not good when you need your modifications to be tested and time was running out!!

When the car comes back to Ireland we plan on doing some trips around Ireland and maybe even another cross European trip!

Hi Tom here,

 Team AcidRain have won 2nd place in the Imagine Cup 2008 World Finals. Wow!! and $10000!! What an achievement.

 Winning Team AcidRain with Joe Wilson of Microsoft

 Winning Team AcidRain with Liam Cronin Microsoft Ireland

 Team AcidRain with Gerald Angley of Irish Embassy and Adam.

(Rosemary on camera) Thanks Gerald for the Champagne!!

 Brian

Hi everyone, our apologies for not blogging for the past few days, we have been very busy refining our project and preparing for the final presentation. I am delighted to tell you that we have just given our last presentation, and we gave it our all.

Check out the stage we had to give our presentation on..

We got some strange reactions while walking around the city, the tourists thought we were French, and the French thought we were just crazy!! It was all in good fun and proves nothing can shake us!

Regards, 

--AcidRain--

Just a quick update.

We're now in the final 6 of the Embedded Development Competition

-Karl 

What a journey! ! Its started off so well! We travelled across North Wales on the coast road admiring the views. The coastline was fabulous, the Welsh beaches and hills were spectacular! We were in great form!!

We travelled down to Chester and North West England to Stafford where we stopped for some food. When we stopped we recieved text messages from concerned people who were wondering why we were stopped for so long!! They thought we had broken down!

 We made good time en route to London arriving earlier than we had planned. We got up at 4.30am the next day after stopping at Enfield.

We travelled along the M25 and managed to dodge the worst of the traffic arriving in Foulkestone early! We had booked the 8.20am train but had the option of the 7am train because we had arrived so early!

Not far from boarding the train the car went over a ramp. The combined weight of our luggage and the 140 litres of extra fuel put huge strain on the car . This wieght caused the suspension subframe to snap! Our wheel came off!

 The car was leaking fluids, the front bumper and side panel were damaged. The oil cooler and windscreen washer bottle were also damaged.

 ....................

to be continued! 

Update.....

The car was towed to Foulkestone to a Vauxhall garage where an awesome bunch of mechanics managed to repair the damage to the wheel!

We just repaired enough to finished the trip to Paris! The vehicle now pulls to the left very strongly!

 Update.....

 So the unfortunate incident involving the ramp cut some electrical wires. We even lost some sensors on our conversion kit! Some wires were left in such a way that they drained the battery as the car sat in the car park on the Novotel!

The electrics which were damaged caused the electric windows to go up and down randomly! The car would also lock and unlock itself...

Aodhan thought I was playing a joke on him. Every time we locked the car and walked a few steps away the car would unlock itself! Aodhan wouldnt believe me until I handed him the keys and the car unlocked itself!

The car is now alive!

So with all the damage to the car we decided to have it checked over by an opel garage in Paris before the drive home. 

 Update......

The car is not road worthy and we have returned to Ireland by plane! The car is now going to be towed to Ireland where it will be repaired!!

Against All Odds,

Made it to Paris.

expect photos and video soon!

Safety First... Second and last!!

Sometimes it takes a nasty shock to set you back on track. A rookies mistake which results in a nice 240V shock with 5 Amps being reduced through you really wakes you up in the morning.

So what have we learned?

There is no harm in being over paranoid about safety, so we’ve rebuild some of the original circuits to incorporate fail safe fuses and quick low resistance paths to ground. Like brian said, it’s much easier to replace a fuse than an engineer...

Remember, Team Acid Rain does these experiments, so you don’t have to....