40 hopeful students from the Danish Technical University (DTU) took the trip to Germany to present their environmentally friendly cars, Dynamo and Innovator, in the race at the EuroSpeedway Lausitz track. The way to the top was not without obstacles for the FLSmidth Roadrunner team but luckily, like any fairytale, the story ended happily and the team won two unofficial titles as world champions in their respective categories.
Read here which challenges the team met before and during the race before they finally felt the sweet taste of victory. Read also about FLSmidth’s contribution to the process of developing the two winning cars
The team and the two cars literally experienced headwind in the beginning of the Shell Eco-marathon. The weather conditions were extremely windy and the rain would not seem to stop. Wednesday, the FLSmidth Roadrunner team and the other participants in the Eco-marathon race were even evacuated due to a powerful storm. The weather forecast for the days to come where the race was to take place did not offer much comfort and the team was worried that Dynamo and Innovator would perform poorly due to a wet base. The sun did however smile on the FLSmidth Roadrunner team as the professional race car driver and eight times Le Mans winner Tom Kristensen stopped by the team camp and certified and signed Dynamo with his autograph.
The race
The weather slowly cleared as the final race approached and the FLSmidth Roadrunner team members were eager to do their best. The first results came from the Urban Concept car Dynamo. Unfortunately the team once again met resistance and due to some uncertainties regarding the time spent the race committee did not approve the result as FLSmidth Roadrunner’s official end result.
Later that same day however, the proto-type car, Innovator, delivered an excellent result as it drove 3549 km/l. This result was approved by the race committee and the FLSmidth Roadrunner team finally had the wind behind them.
The following day Dynamo was ready to capture the EuroSpeedway Lausitz track again. This time the team would have the two technical chiefs from the race committee to supervise their performance in order to assure that no uncertainties arose. This put extra pressure on the car and on the team to do well. Luckily, the pressure only had a positive impact. The Urban Concept car completed the race, driving 589 km./l and did thereby not only achieve first place within its category but it also set a new world record!
Cooperation with FLSmidth R&D
The FLSmidth Roadrunner team has undoubtedly made an enormous effort to achieve these impressive results. In their work with developing and improving the cars, the team has cooperated with FLSmidth. The R&D simulations department at FLSmidth has helped the team to improve the aerodynamics of both the Innovator and the Dynamo.
As the FLSmidth Roadrunner team had designed the two cars they send the technical and design specific details to FLSmidth R&D for them to test and measure the aerodynamics of the cars. Sam Zakrzewski and Michael Bo Dragsdal from R&D-PD tested the two cars’ drag characteristics using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) program ANSYS CFX . With this program they could predict how the aerodynamics of the car would influence the cars’ performance. The first test that Sam ran on Dynamo showed that the car had a rather broad wake which could affect the car’s performance negatively. On account of the rather disturbing results FLSmidth Roadrunners in the last minute were forced to come up with a new design that could narrow down the airstream and thereby possibly improve Dynamo’s achievements. The FLSmidth Roadrunner team focused on improving the back-end of the car. The result was a discrete rim around the top-end of Dynamo. As the illustrations below indicate this in fact reduced the eco-car’s wake significantly.
Actually the drag characteristics were reduced by more than 30%. FLSmidth and the FLSmidth Roadrunner’s cooperation can be said to have contributed to the performance of Dynamo and Innovator and thereby also to the impressive results in Germany.
Other than contributing to the improvements of the eco cars, FLSmidth’s involvement in the project has meant a great deal to the team. The fact that the team does not have to worry too much about the financing of the project allows the students to intensively commit to the actual development and improvement process.
With the excellent results from the unofficial world championship in Germany both the FLSmidth Roadrunners and FLSmidth can be proud of the team’s achievements.