A bright engineering team part of a smart competition!

Being born in Quebec inevitably means growing up connected to winter sports and activities. Every second person here goes skiing or snowshoeing on weekends. The place is covered in snow practically 6 months a year; better make the most of it! Another very popular activity amongst adepts here is snowmobiling. There are trails all over the place and the activity is an important part of the economy of certain regions. The activity however has a bad reputation of being noisy, polluting and quite smelly too, at least amongst the uninitiated…

This is where teams of engineering students like RIT SAE Clean Snowmobile Team come into play. Their yearly objective: reverse engineering an existing snowmobile to reduce emissions and noise by participating to the SAE International Clean Snowmobile Challenge (CSC). For once a engineering competition that is not about being the fastest, this one is about being the greenest… smart!

Very ambitious, the engineering students team is working to be the most innovative and successful in the competition by using advanced automotive engineering simulation software to integrate cutting edge technology into their vehicle. Provided with a portable 3D scanner HandySCAN 3D as part of Creaform’s Engineering Student Sponsorship Program, the team has been able to combine their 3D scan data to GT-ISE and Star-CMM+ to create 3D surface models of engine components for simulation use.

The 3D scanner also allows the team to quickly 3D scan parts and convert them into part file for use in SOLIDWORKS (Dassault Systèmes) explains Cody Schuster, Team Manager. This process allows us to create a partial model of our snowmobile, establish spatial requirements for components and ensure proper fitment of all hard-mounted components..

Thank you guys for sharing your progress thus far and for putting your brains at work on pushing the automotive engineering industry to greener solutions! Keep up the good work and a great success on your upcoming competition!