NTNU students win Shell Eco-Marathon

13 May 2009 | Network Updates | Update from NTNU
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Graduate students from NTNU, along with two volunteer drivers and an 80 kilogram carbon fibre car called Fuel Fighter, have set a new fuel economy record in Lausitz, Germany last week, winning the first prize in the 2009 Shell Eco-Marathon.

The competition calls on university and upper secondary school students to design, build and race a vehicle that can travel the farthest on one litre of petrol. Last Saturday, after ironing out several technical bugs, the NTNU students drove 22 km in 55 minutes in their hydrogen fuel cell car.

When the energy used by the fuel cells was converted to the equivalent amount of petrol it emerged that the Fuel Fighter travelled the equivalent of 1,246 kilometres on a litre of gasoline.

This was way ahead of the record was set last year by De Haagse Hogeschool (Netherlands), whose car ran the equivalent of 848 kilometres on a litre of fuel. The

Most of the students are from NTNU’s Product Design and Manufacturing Programme, along with students from chemistry and biotechnology, engineering cybernetics and electric power engineering.

This year was the 25th annual Shell Eco-Marathon, which had its origins in a 1939 in an argument between employees of Shell Oil’s research laboratory in Wood River, Illinois, as to whose car had better fuel consumption.


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