At the Aeolus-Race 2013, the world championship for “ventomobiles”, the students from Team InVentus from the University of Stuttgart were pleased to come second. This year twelve wind-driven vehicles from five countries participated in the race that took place from 19th until 25th August in the Dutch town of Den Helder. The fastest vehicle was determined that can drive directly against the wind using the surrounding wind as a source of energy. This direction of motion results in an incident flow onto the vehicle, comprising surrounding wind and airstream, so that a maximum amount of wind power is available.
Two years of developing and tightening nuts and bolts paid off for the Stuttgart students in Team InVentus: In a thrilling head to head final with the teams Chinook from Canada and Broers from the Netherlands, they won the silver medal. In so doing InVentus achieved a driving speed of 79.1 percent of the wind speed and with this exceeded the current world record of 75 percent. However, in a decisive phase in the race the drive chain of the vehicle came off so that Broers pipped InVentus to the post to win the race. Due to massive technical problems in the rotor, Chinook dropped back to 5th place after they had set the new world record with 82.6 percent. Even so reliability won over speed since the Stuttgart InVentus Team did have the quickest drivable ventomobile and reached the best position among the student participants of the event.
At the first Aeolus Race as early as 2008 the Stuttgart InVentus team came out as winners and have now been able to tie up with their earlier successes after a lean period. “This is confirmation for the skills of the students and the quality of the teaching at the University of Stuttgart“, the holder of the Endowed Chair for Wind Energy at the University of Stuttgart, Prof. Po Wen Cheng, is pleased to say. “In the framework of this project, partly funded from student fees, the young people were able to gain experience, among others in the fields of aerodynamics, structure dynamics and mechanics, lightweight constructions, electrical engineering, production and management and this will give them an excellent preparation for their multidisciplinary everyday working life as engineers.“
The InVentus team will now start working on eliminating possible sources of error and further increasing the degree of effectiveness of the vehicle so that good results can also be expected again at the Aeolus Race 2014.
Further information:
Matthias Arnold, University of Stuttgart, Endowed Chair Wind Energy (SWE) at the Institute of
Aircraft Design (IFB) Tel. 0711/685-68273, Email: arnold (at) ifb.uni-stuttgart.de
Andrea Mayer-Grenu, University of Stuttgart, Department of University Communication, Tel.
0711/685-82176,
Email: andrea.mayer-grenu (at) hkom.uni-stuttgart.de
