CCNY's Chem-E-Car team with “Sulfurious” [center] at the 2017 AIChE finals.
Team CCNY, comprising undergraduates from The City College of New York’s Grove School of Engineering, is the 2017 AIChE Chem-E-Car finals’ Spirit of Competition Award winner for the third year running. In addition, “Sulfurious,” the CCNY entry, placed 11th out of 41 domestic and international qualifiers in the competition in Minneapolis.
Sulfurious won the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Mid-Atlantic competition last spring to advance to the AIChE finals. The objective of the Chem-E-Car competition is for students to build a car, the size of a shoebox, which runs and stops at a precise distance via one or more chemical reactions.
Sulfurious runs on a manganese-zinc battery, developed in partnership with the CCNY-based CUNY Energy Institute. The car’s name is derived from the “Too Fast, Too Furious” movie franchise and the main element in the stopping mechanism, sulfur.
In Minneapolis, Sulfurious performed well, coming within 90 cm [35.43 inches] from the target of 23.5 m [77.08 feet] while carrying a load of 157 ml water. “The competition was stiff with the top team being 2 cm [0.787 inches] from the target,” said Elizabeth Biddinger, assistant professor of chemical engineering and the CCNY team faculty advisor.
Indonesia's ITS University won the Chem-E-Car Trophy.
Sulfurious’ trip to Minneapolis was the fifth straight by a CCNY team to the AIChE finals. Their honors include a second place finish in 2013 with “REAKTER,” and Spirit of Competition awards in 2015 with “RuSTi” and 2016 with “Iodonator.”
This year’s team comprised (all chemical engineering unless indicated):
- Captain Oswald Shakir Julien, senior;
- Co-captain Nannette Hernandez, senior;
- Co-Captain Karlas Christoper, sophomore;
- Hamad Haider, senior;
- Yash Patel, senior;
- Sujana Shifon, sophomore;
- Adebambo Shomoye, senior;
- Stephan Smith, senior;
- Leo Strauss, senior, electrical engineering; and
- Keith Williams, senior, mechanical engineering.
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