UNSW - The University of New South Wales

06/08/2022 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 06/07/2022 21:06

Sunswift 7: Driving technology forward

Sunswift 7:
The designer

Ben Heina was seven years old when he first started to draw and design cars - so it was a dream come true when he was handed the chance to craft Sunswift 7 into a potential world record breaker.

Even as a Mechanical Engineering undergraduate at UNSW he had no formal education in car design, so like most of the rest of the team he was forced to rapidly develop his skills.

"For the initial design I started with some sketches to just get a vision of what I thought would be good and then started to build that into computer-aided design (CAD) models," he says.

"From there, it was all about running aerodynamic simulations because aerodynamics dominates everything else on the car in terms of the effect it can have on power consumption.

"I went through 57 iterations of design before the final shape was determined, and in between that we had to make sure that everything else was going to work. So, how are we actually going to fit the solar cells on the car? How curved do they need to be? Can the solar cells withstand that curvature? Is there room for the suspension? Is there enough space for a driver?

"I had never really done aerodynamics before, just one subject on computational fluid dynamics (CFD), but that barely scratched the surface of what there is to know.

"In the end, my university thesis was on aerodynamics as well, because I enjoyed that element while working on the Sunswift car. The 57 iterations of design for that were basically by hand - each time I would run a simulation, analyse the results, adjust the CAD model, set it all up again and repeat the process like that over and over and over again.

"It's really time-consuming and I thought there had to be a better way. So I went and did some research for my thesis and managed to automate a lot of the process to the point where a program now runs the simulation and then can change the geometry of the car on its own, to reduce drag.

"It then re-runs the simulation, changes geometry again if needed and cycles through that loop until it achieves a target that you have set.

"Overall, designing Sunswift 7 has been a dream come true. I wanted to build a car that when people see it for the first time they think: 'Oh, I'd really like to drive that and have it in my garage'. Rather than it just looking like a strange futuristic space car.

"But we also have a record attempt which will validate whether the whole Sunswift team have achieved our goal, which is to say we've built the best solar car in the world.

"I think that will also show to the public what is possible with electric cars. At the moment, they still have these concerns about range, about going on long road trips, about charging the battery all the time.

"Sunswift 7 shows that an electric car can have the range, can have the power, can have the charging capacity, everything's right there."