Alérion Supermileage does it again!

Congratulations to the Alérion Supermileage team, who recently won second place in the prestigious Detroit Shell Eco-Marathon! Another great success for the engineering students  from Université Laval, in Quebec City, which we already featured this competition here.

It was undoubtedly a race filled with emotions for the Alérion Supermileage team, which held the lead throughout the competition, finally coming JUST behind the University of Toronto team in the very last lap, by a tenth of a millilitre of fuel!

Interesting to note that it’s two Canadian teams, (the same best as last year, with the opposite outcome) who were competing for the top spot in a downtown Detroit circuit –the very mythical all-American automobile town! All in all, 113 teams from 5 countries all across the Americas participated in this engineering challenge, involving single-passenger vehicles with the lowest fuel consumption possible. For the Eco-Marathon, Alérion managed to cover an astonishing 1,431 km with a single litre of fuel.

The 3D laser scanner HandySCAN 3D was a part of it

Creaform selected the Université Laval team for a second year in a row, as part of our Student Sponsorship program. Sponsorship candidates are certainly not limited to a single year only; teams that are active contributors, like the Alérion Supermileage, actually have a good chance of being picked again.
The team put their loaned HandySCAN 3D handheld 3D scanner to good use throughout the year, employing it to digitize and reverse engineer the vehicle’s engine base, cylinder, piston and base cover. Julien St-Hilaire, from the Alérion Supermileage Engine team, stated that they were “really satisfied with the results” they obtained with the scanner.
The models achieved with the scans were then used to perform kinematic movement simulations. They also tested new alignment techniques with the 3D digitizer HandySCAN 3D, with the hopes of freeing themselves from the university’s measuring arm!

The engine base 3D model

Good luck to the team, who will take part of the SAE Supermileage race in Michigan in June. The Université Laval engineering students are very confident in their chances of making it to the top, thanks in part to their new engine code and very efficient tubeless carbon wheels!

The 2014-2015 team