Wawasee Takes Three Vehicles to Supermileage Contest
Posted
Jordan Fouts-
SYRACUSE – Matt Siri is taking his love of Nikola Tesla on the road this weekend, along with 10 other students in Allen Coblentz' hands-on high-mileage car class.
Siri designed the motor for Wawasee High School's debut entry in the electric car division of the Shell Eco-Marathon Americas. The team will also race gas and diesel vehicles in the contest for high school and university teams in Houston, Texas.
It's a race of endurance rather than speed – squeezing every mile out of every drop of juice, whatever the power source. For its third year in the contest, Wawasee hopes to beat the 2011 gas winner of 2,564.8 mpg, the battery winner of 386.2 miles per kilowatt hour, and their own win in the diesel category with 574.8 mpg.
Wawasee achieved 613 mpg in the gas division in 2010, and 878 mpg last year, which earned them ninth place out of 25 teams. This year's competition will see 112 teams take to the track with 131 vehicles in more than a dozen categories.
Larry Pletcher, a retired Wawasee teacher who helps with the engineering class build, recalled Monday the bumpy road their first effort faced.
“For the first year we just had one car, and we had every trouble in the world,” he said while loading the three-wheeled, one-man crafts into a semi trailer Monday, to be joined later by vehicles from Warsaw and Goshen.
Pletcher had high hopes for the recovery circuit motor Siri designed, a later addition as the electric build was progressing. The car can run on a more standard electric motor in the rear wheel hub if it has to, he noted, “but if his works, it's gravy.”
Siri admitted his own confidence is more fluid.
“It's dynamic. Some days are better than others,” he said while studying the power usage of his motor, which barely registered even as the wheels spun – a good sign. Above him on the wall of the new school tech lab hung the fiberglass shells of past vehicles – the Warrior, the Mean Green and the Diesel Weasel.
The electric car was christened White Lightning.
“I didn't choose it,” Siri remarked. “I would have gone with 'Egg of Columbus,' but nobody would know what it means.”
The Egg of Columbus was an induction motor Tesla demonstrated at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, a copper “egg” in a rotating magnetic field.
Besides the Serbian inventor, Siri drew inspiration for his motor from Steve Wygant of Blackpoint Engineering, Goshen, and John Bedini, an electrical engineer from Idaho.
Though his first venture into electronics was taking apart the family TV at age six, Siri said the story of Tesla is what really solidified his interest. More recently, he built a Tesla coil at home capable of shooting five-foot arcs of purple plasma through the air.
He plans on dual majoring in physics and electrical engineering at Rose-Hulman Instititute of Technology in Terre haute after high school.
“I plan to hit electrical waves pretty heavy, but I'll have to get a lot of that done on my own time,” he said.
Coblentz started overseeing supermileage car classes that competed at the state level in 1999. He noted that each new class starts with little more than the lessons learned by the last, though the new tech lab does offer some valuable tools.
“We start from scratch each year. Maybe too much,” he remarked. “But that way each kid gets the whole experience of building a car from beginning to end, and they get to try to make the vehicle different.”
