BENGALURU: A team of 23 automobile enthusiasts from third and fourth-year Mechanical and Electronics Engineering at University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE), Bangalore, called Team eMpower UVCE, recently took part in the National Go Kart Championship. In what was their first outing at a competition of this sort, without any professional help and a budget of just `80,000, they managed to emerge sixth in the country among 90 teams, and the first in the State.
Their project was a four-wheeled drive single-seater with a 125cc Honda Shine bike engine and manual paddle-shift gear and clutch mechanisms. The vehicle had the capability of reaching speeds of 60 km per hour and excellent mileage. This winning team is a subset of a larger club at the college called SAE India UVCE, which in turn is part of the internationally recognised body called Society for Automotive Engineers (SAE). They all have a common goal: to provide a platform where ideas can grow, with a strong belief that simple ideas can lead to innovative thinking.
Though in their words the club is “a two-year-old toddler that has learnt to race,” in a short span of time the 100-member team has had many an achievement to boast of. So far, they have participated in several bicycle design competitions, demonstrated projects like creating disc brakes using everyday materials and restored working models. They have designed the racing vehicle chassis for SAE India Supra, a competition that requires students to model a formula-type car, and are all set to take on SAE Baja, an off-road vehicle racing inter-collegiate event soon. They regularly conduct competitions in the college, like car sketching and clay modelling.
Mohammed Aamir VT, a final-year Mechanical Engineering student, says, “All of our design features till date are born out of common logic and basic understanding. We then match the product of our combined thinking with existing technologies, and after final design validation, we come up with designs which are of note, like the Go-kart.”
— svetlana@newindianexpress.com