UH Manoa Mechanical Engineering Team heads to Nebraska

HONOLULU, Hawaii (HawaiiNewsNow) - Mechanical engineering students at U-H Manoa are heading to an international automotive competition in Nebraska. They’ll go against teams to design and build the best Formula-One style car. Connie Young and Stephen Cadiz join us here on Sunrise.

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa mechanical engineering students will participate in the 2019 International Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Collegiate Design Competition, an international engineering design competition to design, build and compete a small Formula One-style vehicle. This will take place June 19–22, 2019

A team of 10 UH Mānoa College of Engineering students (and recent graduates) will compete against 80 teams from the United States, Canada, Mexico, India and Brazil. The students work together to incorporate a budget, and apply theories from the classroom to design, build and test their vehicle.

This extracurricular STEM learning opportunity provides the students with real-world experience. The engineering team’s SAE car project is one of about a dozen senior design projects for upper-level engineering students. Students begin meeting the summer before the SAE Formula competition to work on the budget, plan the design and infrastructure of the car, and create a goal timeline.

For the 2018–19 car project, 21 upper-level engineering students worked on the car throughout the school year.

Of the 21 students who worked on the project, 10 will pay for their own airfare, housing and food to make the trek to Lincoln, Nebraska, for the three-day competition. Most team members graduated from UH Mānoa in spring 2019.

The College of Engineering team’s participation in the 2019 Formula SAE competition will be the sixth consecutive contest for a team from UH. In 2018, UH Mānoa place 14th overall out of more than 115 universities and was ranked second in efficiency and 10th for business.

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