Some assembly required

Hands-on experience is as much a part of an engineering education as formal classroom training at Iowa State. Students work all year for competitions or projects in the spring.

“The real value is derived from the creative process,” said Elliot Combs, president of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. “When you sit down and build something you encounter so many road blocks,problems and questions you didn’t think of before.”

The regional Chem-E-Car competition and the University Mars Rover Challenge are two such competitions.

The car competition will take place at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Mid-America Conference on April 9-10. The $30,000 event is sponsored by the AIChE.

This year the conference is being hosted by Iowa State for the first time in more than 10 years.

Students participating must build a car run by a chemical process. The car cannot be controlled remotely.

The braking system in the car must also be controlled by a chemical process. There are no mechanical devices used to stop the car.

Each car is required to carry a load across a certain distance for the competition. The goal is to stop as close to the specified finish line as possible.

The catch to these rules is that the distance to the finish line and the load is not given to the teams until only one hour before the competition .

In addition to the performance part of the competition each team is required to present its car on a poster. The poster outlines various aspects of the car and how it is designed. A team is judged on its posters and the performance of its car.

The Chem-E-Car competition is open to all engineering students who want to participate. The competition not only improves students’ skill in chemical engineering, but electrical and mechanical engineering as well.

Each team must design the mechanical structure of the car as well as the complex electrical circuits inside. Like many other engineering projects, the whole system spans across many different disciplines of engineering.

The University Mars Rover Challenge also tests students’ ability to design a complete system in order to accomplish a specified task.

“You really need to make sure all the systems work together,” said Andreas Frick, team leader for MAVRIC. “It doesn’t help you if the mechanical team is doing everything and then the robots and the electronics team doesn’t know what’s going on.”

MAVRIC is the name of the Iowa State team competing in the 2010 University Mars Rover Challenge in Hanksville, Utah. The competition is hosted by The Mars Society. The competition takes place Jun. 3-5.

Each team competing in the University Mars Rover Challenge has to build a rover capable of completing four tasks, the site survey task, the sample return task, the emergency navigation task, and the equipment servicing task. These tasks are designed so the rover can aid astronauts on Mars in the future.

Rovers must be able to survey the surrounding area, analyze the soil, aid in an emergency rescue mission of a distressed astronaut and help fix broken equipment.

“It teaches you about the unknown unknowns,” Frick said. “Most teams get there and it works fine in the lab, but when it gets sand blasted in the desert of Utah and you can’t directly control the rover, all of the sudden it becomes very real and very rugged. The same is true for real space exploration.”

Team MAVRIC is currently working on version two of its Mars rover. The team last competed in 2008, but skipped the 2009 competition because it hadn’t completely tested their rover.

The team are set to compete in the 2010 competition on Jun. 3-5.