| 7/13/2008 | Email this article • Print this article |
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Nick Furlong/Review
Tom Lenertz, a recent graduate of St. Thomas Academy, cruises in the Safer Urban Motorcycle. Lenertz was one of two student leaders of the Experimental Vehicle Team, which presented its grant-funded project in Boston last month. |
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Nick Furlong/Review
Brennan Lee, Tom Mealey, Tom Lenertz and Alex Pinkerton stand by the motorcycle they and 12 other students built. |
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Students create a green machine
The motorcycle is battery powered, includes safety features
Michael Wilcox
Review staff
Good things can come in green packages, too.
Or at least that's what the Experimental Vehicle Team at St. Thomas Academy discovered this past school year when it designed an electric motorcycle wrapped in an extra-safe - if off-beat - shell.
Dubbed the Safer Urban Motorcycle, the (very) green machine was designed for the average consumer, said Brennan Lee and Tom Mealey, who will be seniors at St. Thomas and helped build the vehicle.
"People ride motorcycles because they're fuel efficient, but they don't ride them because they're safe," Lee said.
The team won a $10,000 grant from the Lemelson-MIT InventTeams program in Boston to create a contraption that addresses a social problem, and three weeks ago they presented their work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Along with a faculty adviser, the team of 19 students designed and built a motorcycle surrounded by a frame for crash protection and powered by a set of five batteries.
"We also decided to go electric and not gas, and that's just because gas prices are so high," Lee said.
The motor plugs into a household outlet, charges in three hours and gives the motorcycle about 50 miles of cruising time. Its top speed is 60 miles per hour, and it's even legal to drive on the roads now that the state has approved the vehicle.
Hours of work
The students said they could not begin to count the hours they put into the project during the school year.
"We don't even want to know," Lee quipped. The project demanded time after school each day, along with work every Sunday, but the students chalked it up to a labor of love.
"It's fun," Lee said. "You're doing something you like. You got to remember that, even when it gets really dirty."
And it certainly did get dirty. The student shaped the unique cage surrounding the vehicle by sanding out foam blocks.
"That took about three months to get all the sanding done," Lee noted. "That was probably the longest part of the project as well as the dirtiest."
The team's adviser, physics teacher Mark Westlake, said that while "there's nothing attractive about being dirty for weeks and weeks at a time," the students remained motivated.
Other road bumps cropped up along the way. Parts of the electrical system did not work correctly, Mealey and Lee noted.
"Some of the units we purchased were programmed wrong," Lee said. "So (it) was very frustrating that we had to spend a long time figuring out what the problem was."
Though the electrical issue was unavoidable, Westlake said the students on the Experimental Vehicle Team need to be dedicated to the process and whatever it involves, not just the end product.
"One of the things I like to do is let them fail," he said. "I think that's an important part of any science project."
Big hopes
While many other science students tape together cardboard tubes and plastic straws to help an egg survive a drop, the students at St. Thomas combined a carbon fiber body, steel chassis, Lexan windshield and lithium-phosphate batteries for their project.
"They're so impressive," Westlake said. "The minute I start to think I'm the smartest guy in the room, I've made a horrible mistake. They're so smart."
For future projects, the team is looking at using advanced computer software employed by aerospace and other engineering industries.
In the past the team has designed vehicles that get more than 1,300 miles per gallon of gasoline, a bike that travels across ice and a solar car that drove from Austin, Texas, to Pasadena, Calif.
The team members presented their motorcycle last month in Boston to the Lemelson-MIT program alongside other students from around the country.
"One of the coolest parts," Mealey said, "was having people come up and say 'How much is this? I want to buy it. I would definitely use this to drive to work every day.'"
Michael Wilcox can be reached at southwest@lillienews.com or 651-748-7815.
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