NJIT's Hydrogen-Powered Hy-Lander Wins the Poster Competition in the Chem-E-Car Finals

NJIT’s Chem-E-Car team, developers of the self-driving, hydrogen-powered Hy-Lander, won first place this past weekend for their poster in the championship round of the international student competition.

In the poster round, judges look for in-depth knowledge of the car’s mechanisms from every team member, design uniqueness, which the Hy-Lander had in abundance, and major changes, rather than superficial tinkering, from previous models. The judges also scrutinize cars’ financing, as the contest imposes no limits on what the college teams can spend.

The Hy-Lander crew embedded a YouTube video walk-through directly into their poster, with audio narration by the team’s captain, Diego Franco, so the judges could familiarize themselves with the car's design and its safety features before the question-and-answer period. 

The car’s mission, to traverse a room at a steady roll and stop at the finish line when time is called, is no mean feat. Its success rests upon two highly calibrated devices – a fuel cell to move and an intricate braking system to stop – that are both triggered by chemical reactions. The car that comes closest to the finish line before shutting itself off is proclaimed the winner.

While the Hy-lander scored in the middle of the pack in the race itself, it did not fail to impress. Its design, which eschews standard mechanisms, such as the iodine clock stopping reaction used by most other teams, is unique. With its large wheels giving it the look of a monster truck, the car has also won compliments from judges and other teams for its novel appearance.

“We definitely stood out among a lot of cars that looked very similar,” said Franco, a senior majoring in chemical engineering, who ran the race on Sunday in Tiernan Hall with co-captain Christian Kielbowicz. 

Kielbowicz described the Hy-Lander’s essential structure as a two-foot-long “basket with a lot of tubing attached.” The tubes, each with its own pressure gauge, give the car a quirky look, but are key to its performance, he noted.

The car’s engine combines hydrochloric acid and aluminum and feeds the resulting hydrogen gas into the tubes, whose gauges steadily regulate the pressure at which the hydrogen enters the fuel cell. It  moves at a formidable clip of .4 meters per second. The team has also improved filtering so that the chemical reaction’s byproducts, aluminum chloride and water, do not infiltrate the fuel cell.

A second contraption, a sensor attached to a relay switch, stops the car as close as possible to the finish line. The Hy-Lander uses fiberglass sticks to block the sensor until an attached magnesium strip is dissolved by acid – its concentration pre-calibrated to yield a desired time – allowing the stick to fall and light to hit the sensor, triggering the brakes.

According to the rules, the car must travel the specified distance while carrying a load of water. The distance and weight are announced one hour before the competition, setting off a flurry of last-minute calculations.

Franco acknowledged the ingenuity of the many Chem-E-Car teammates who began developing the 2020 model nearly two years ago and led them to this moment.

“The car didn’t qualify for the championship round last year, but we’ve been perfecting their technology ever since, improving its consistency,” said Franco, adding that for his part, “working on the car really helps builds good lab skills.”.

This year’s competition pitted NJIT’s team against top engineering schools, such as Cornell, Northeastern, Virginia Tech and the Brazilian team from Fundação Educacional Inaciana - Padre Sabóia.

Much like major league sports matchups during the COVID-19 pandemic, NJIT’s downsized team of two ran the race, sponsored by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) on their own turf, without a group of teammates cheering them on or competitors silently hoping they fall short.

Roman Voronov, associate professor of chemical and materials engineering and the team’s long-time advisor, supervised the race with his Ph.D. student Anh Tong, the team's supervisor. He noted the student's “remarkable progress” this semester given the logistical difficulties imposed on them by social distancing guidelines, which limited work on the car to two people at a time. Some of the teams had as many as 10 members, the students said.

“Last semester we had an interdisciplinary team of 11 chemical, biomedical and electrical engineering students working collaboratively to improve our design," Voronov said. "As a result, our car has become twice as powerful, allowing it to carry more weight, and its performance is a lot more predictable, which is important for calibrating it to stop at the designated distance."