History of the Project

Hello Everyone!

I’m glad to be writing my first blog post for QFCT; I’m sure more will come in the future. As was touched on last week, the team is a group of organized engineering and commerce students driving toward a common goal. This goal is of course, to create the world’s first fuel cell powered snowmobile!

Let’s dive into the history of this project as a whole; I’ll try my best to give the most accurate rendition from my point of view. I joined the team in 2009; a couple of months after the project had started. The team was small and I was the first commerce student to join. We had acquired a snowmobile, which actually spurred the interest in starting this project. I heard that there were a few other ideas down the pipeline but we were determined – after receiving the snowmobile – to pursuit what is our current project today!

The cornerstone of this project was in research; most of the difficulties that we faced within the coming months rooted from this. After a year of this, we had hit the summer with high hopes of springing the project along very quickly. Fortunately, we had a strong team of four students working on the project and had high levels of success in these areas. This summer, in combination with our organizations restructuring has changed the team into what we are today. The snowmobile project is really a team defining project; we are basically designing our team around the project rather than the other way around!

At the start of this school year we made a very large push to expand and reorganize the team. This was a massive success; we now boast over 50 members and have a significant number of students who are not engineers who have shown interest in the team.

Through the initial research and the recent restructuring of our team; we are gearing up to have an awesome close to the second part of this school year!

Till Next Time

Mark Lukas

Commerce 2013

Sponsorship Manager

Queen’s Fuel Cell Team

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