How we built a race car in Unilag - Students

Abraham Imohiosen, a 500 level Computer Engineering student of the University of Lagos (UNILAG) and team manager of a group of students who recently built a race car speaks to Tolu George on the motivation for participating in the Shell Ecomaraton competition, challenges of building the race car and benefits of embarking on the project.


Can you explain what the competition is all about?
The Shell ecomarathon competition is an event that is organized around the world in 3 different continents. The aim of the competition is to encourage students to build fuel efficient vehicles that are worthy of futuristic innovation. That’s what we are trying to do here; we were invited by Shell Nigeria last year to participate and represent Nigeria in the competition.

We were not the only ones, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) and University of Benin (UNIBEN), were invited as well. This year, it’s UNILAG and UNIBEN that will be participating and representing Nigeria in the competition. So that is that about the competition, now about our project, we actually entered into one of the few categories of the competition that’s the battery electric category, in these category students are going to build vehicles that will be powered by batteries.

Now there are other categories like the petrol categories, the diesel category, and the hydrogen cells category. In this category you power your vehicle with your petrol, diesel. So for the project we would be using an ICE engine (international combustion engine). A hydrogen cell is the one that you use for your battery. Our project is divided into four different parts the electrical system, the mechanical system, the materials system.

What is the benefit of competitions?
The competition encourages teams to use eco friendly materials in every way possible. Apart from racing on the track for fuel efficiency, because that is the ultimate goal of the competition, there is actually an off track session of the competition and in that part there is a price category, an award category called the communication award. So the communication award is actually given to the team that can put up, the most decent entry as per communication and publicity, so publicizing your team, communicating to people around in your locality about the competition and what you are trying to do. So that is that about everything

Is Shell funding the whole project?
Yes Shell is funding the whole project.


So what is next after this competition?
After this edition of the competition, we don’t just plan to sit back and say oh we’ve gone for one we are okay now we are good, we plan to go for subsequent competitions, in Europe, Asia and the Americas. So, for now we are participating in the European competition, the next time we would be going out we would be participating in the Asian competition, so as soon as they start the middle eastern/Africa edition we would be going for that as well.



Most students will not want to associate themselves with projects like this; they rather go to parties or engage in things that are ephemeral. So what basically inspired your entering into the project?
First of all, I don’t totally agree with you. I think if students are actually given the opportunity they will, if they give them the option of going to parties than actually participating in something like this they would actually choose participating in something like this. For me, at least may be I don’t go to a lot of parties, truly the project was like an only option for me, because you have a project and you don’t have any choice you have to do it

Only option in what sense?
Yes, I am not really the party type I spend most of my time studying.
 
So it was like a big break for you?
Yes, a very big break


How did you get members of the team?
We got the team members through the UNILAG mobile and some newspapers. We had a very huge turnout, there were some interviews and our supervising lecturers, picked some of the few that had what it took to actually deliver these project.


So how are you balancing school life and this project?
It was not been easy when we started initially, but we had to find a way to balance things out, and I believe almost everybody in the team did.


Who are the other team members?
Our lead is professor Mowete. We also have other supervising lecturers like Dr. Amuda of the department of Metallurgical and Materials Science, Engineer Tunji of Electrical Engineering, Engr. Mohammed of Electrical Engineering Dept, Dr. Gbeniyi of Mechanical Engineering and Dr. Balogun of Electrical Engineering. For the students, we have other Segun Adebayo, 400 level Mechanical Engineering, Shade Agbaje, 400 level Mechanical Engineering, Rueben, 200 level Materials Engineering, Obinna Agba 500 level Electrical Engineering, Paula Aliyu, 500 level Computer Engineering and David Emukpere, 500 Computer Engineering. Others apart from myself include, Boye Abayomi, 500 level Materials and Metallurgical Engineering, Ciramo Ojetunde, Creative Arts Dept., he was in 400 level as at the time we started this project but now a graduate, Tunji Salami of the Department of Mass Communication, Eze Owualah of the department of Chemical Engineering and Emeka Author also of the department of Chemical Engineering. We had a lot of people that contributed to the project one of them was Ibrahim Akanbi, we have sola, I have forgotten her surname, so those are the people we have working on the project and together we were able to put up what we have now, and it’s quite impressive, because when we look at it, we just smiled that even though this stuff is not 100%, this actually impressive for the time we had to work on it.



What were the challenges you faced in building the car?
First of all experience, I really appreciate what our lecturers did, initially they gave us the opportunity of exploring ourselves and seeing what we would come up with, so we had the issue of inexperience, for instance, I planned to buy some electrical components, because I didn’t really know that or I thought they were not available in Nigeria, instead of me resorting to local market first I bought the items from the UK and it took considerable time before the items arrived and so that took some time before I could actually get on with actual work on the project and also we had inadequate tools around unlike in some other parts of the world where you can easily get access to these tools or equipment, over here if you don’t have it you have to improvise in some very manual way. Also we had the challenge of logistics – when we had to get things, the hold up around was very serious, and it slowed us done. Also the local vendors of these materials around they don’t really know, they don’t have technical details about it, you understand you might want to buy an electrical component, you know am using these because am in electrical engineering, when you want to communicate with your colleague about it. You will call may be a number like x25570, you understand but when you go to the market and mention something like that the vendor will be confused he does not know, so he will probably have one local name that will probably be funny when you hear it. And two of you cannot really communicate, so you find yourself spending a lot of time there, you find yourself going there and not getting what you want even though it might be right under your nose. We had some other challenges but those are the two I can wrap my mind around now.


What are the benefits this project has brought to you?
Like I always tell my friends who is working with on this project, the project is a very big project and I have actually been able to aspire more than I was aspiring before. I would have envisioned a better last 6 months of my life because it has been very engaging, I can remember what I was doing 6 months ago, and that’s how 6 months seems so short. So in all this project has been very engaging, it has been a very big period of learning for me and also getting to know some other new people there, the members of my team


What future projects would you be working on?
What I want to do is not very conventional, actually am not going to be working on anything like this again, I plan to continue my career and study in the field of physics. Actually I don’t want to digress too much from electrical engineering


Do you think you stand a better chance to win the competition?
Frankly, I don’t think so.


Why do you hold this view?
The competition is actually very innovative, so we are first timers even though we might want to make ourselves believe that we can actually win, the truth is that for most teams that will be participating for the first time like ourselves, our focus is to actually meet minimum standard of the competition, because there are actually rules, every year the competition organizers give out rules so if you don’t meet the minimum technical requirement for the competition you would not be allowed to race, so it’s like you didn’t come for the competition at all. So what we are aiming at is to actually meet these minimum requirement and get on the track, get our vehicle to race from the beginning of the track to the end of the track, then subsequent competitions our plan is to optimize our vehicle, and actually put in an entry that is going to say ok I want to compete with the best teams in this competition.


Do you think projects like this will bring about development in Nigeria?
I believe that Nigeria cannot move forward if we keep telling ourselves that we have the resources, we have the manpower, we have the brains to do it, we have to actually do it before we can move forward and its projects like this that can actually make us do something, you can imagine the next time I would be trying to do something, instead of building a prototype of a car, I might be thinking of building a real car, from there I will be thinking of building an airplane.

Culled from The Nation

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