Our early concepts for the African Solar Taxi were developed using Sketchup, which is great for quick visualisations but is not as good as a proper 3D CAD model. Our industrial design student Andrew has therefore converted our design into SolidWorks, which allows us to evolve the design further, undertake structural analysis and prepare for construction of the first prototype vehicle.
How does it look?
Last night we had a good long design session at St Patrick’s Technical College.
The St Patrick’s students have done a fine job building the seating buck (the full scale mockup of the seating layout). It enabled us to hone in on improvements to the body’s shape, size and layout. We made various changes to the seat heights and locations, and were able to better visualise the suspension mounting points, the steering and the centre of mass.
After an initial session getting a feel for the overall dimensions of our vehicles, St Patrick’s College is about to start building a “seating buck”, which will enable us to refine the layout, dimensions and construction methods. Whilst doing so, they will draw on ergonomics data developed over many decades for conventional vehicle design.
On Wednesday evening we met for another design workshop. The focus this week was on the dimensions of the vehicle’s body. Here’s the result of our efforts:
The African Solar Taxi project has its technical origins in work originally undertaken at the University of South Australia, which was later extended by a motley collection of tinkerers and adventurers called Team Trev.
This video introduces Trev and shows it in action on the streets of Adelaide:
http://vimeo.com/groups/47/videos/62135765
Trev. It’s green.
