As part of the requirement for the ChE 232 (Principles of ChE) class sophomore year, students need to build a ChE car.  The ChE car needed to run on chemical reactions alone.  Another requirement was that it had to fit inside a container the size of a shoe box.  The presentations by the current ChE 232 students showed some interesting concepts.  In order to have the car travel a desired distance during the competition, the groups needed to perform many trial runs.  They performed many trial runs with various amounts of reactants.  Two groups were baking soda/vinegar powered, while one was rocket powered.  With the information acquired from these experimental runs, the groups were able to predict what reactant needed was required for the car to travel a given distance.  By altering the amount of baking soda and size of rocket used, the three teams were able to have their car travel a desired distance.  With the experimental data obtained, the groups used some basic physics formulas to acquire data for moving the car any distance.  Also, by graphing, the groups can predict a distance between two known  experimental distances.  

The groups tested their cars on the top level of the parking garage on the west end of campus.  This proved to be a mistake.  Since the surface of the parking garage was smooth, and the competition took place on a regular surface street, their results obtained were skewed.  The friction that would take place between a smooth surface opposed to gravel would be different. There would be more friction on the wheels during the competition because of the street surface.  This would require more reactant to move the car the distance determined previously on the garage.

Congratulations to all of those that participated in the competition. Special congratulations to "Bob." Bob, short for "Ballistic or Bust," is the came in third.  It was just 19 inches from the finish line in the national challenge at the Reno Hilton, November 4, 2001. Bob was third out of twenty-four teams across the nation.  The team members are:  Michael Fears, Bronson Duck, Sage Hiibel, Andrew Katz, Cathy Sue McMurray, Ivan Gantan, Francisco Vega, and Wyatt Robards.
 

Warren Dang
ChE Class of 2005