Sunday 5 February 2012

Garage Hours Week of January 30th

So lets start off this post by diving into a bit of what QFCT is. The team has over 50 members that handle everything from designing the support systems for our fuel cell, to designing and adding new content to our website www.qfct.ca.  The members work together on projects during the year, and we have regularly scheduled garage hour sessions during the week on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5:30.  These sessions give members an opportunity to work in the team space on the BRP snowmobile, and interact with the other groups.

As mentioned earlier, we meet every Tuesday and Thursday, and the last week was no exception. This week was a great week in garage hours for the team.  The fuel cell stack teams have been working to decide on the system we will use, and serious progress was made.  We were able to get in touch with potential suppliers, and we are confident we will have a stack chosen shortly.  The mechanical teams have made progress on designing the transmission.  One of the main projects a student is obtaining credit for (counting towards his engineering degree) is designing the enclosure for the batteries.  The enclosure is being designed so that it can only be opened when the power is off, and will also act as an insulator (temperature and electric wise).  Eventually when the number of batteries has been chosen, the student will build and install the case.  This is one of the best examples of how the team provides students with real life engineering design work, which they may not get through their degree program!

We'll be keeping you posted every week about what we get up to in garage hours. Hope this update has been informativ, and we'll back next week to give another update!

-QFCT

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