The HKUST Solar Car Team “Sunstrider” won the Energy Efficient Design Award in the “New Energy New Generation” Solar Car Competition, which was organized by the Environment Bureau and the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department (EMSD) of the HKSAR Government and held in the Hong Kong Science Park on 3 and 10 January 2016. The competition attracted eight teams from CUHK, HKU, HKUST, PolyU and CityU in the tertiary education category and was part of the “Energy Saving for All” Campaign launched by the Bureau and EMSD.

The competition aimed to enhance young people’s knowledge and interest in renewable energy and energy efficiency, and to provide a platform to showcase their research capabilities in innovative engineering. Each team was required to design and construct a solar car with the integration of environmental technologies and innovative elements.

The Energy Efficient Design Award won by HKUST students aimed to encourage teams to design and fabricate an energy efficient solar energy vehicle that exhibited high-energy utilization rate in terms of distance travelled by achieving excellence in, but not limited to, aerodynamic, mechanical, and electrical designs etc.

The HKUST Solar Car Team consists of two sub-teams, namely Sundial and Sunstrider, with a total of 25 students from Civil and Environmental Engineering, Electronic and Computer Engineering, and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, under the supervision of Prof Christopher Chao, Prof Tim Woo and Prof Robin Ma. Special thanks go to BMTPow Ltd for the batteries support and RS Components Limited for the consumables support.

In a post-competition exhibition on 4 March, team Sunstrider was invited to showcase and present the innovative elements of their solar car to secondary school students at the EMSD headquarters in Kowloon Bay. The exhibition was organized as one of the competition aims is to cultivate innovation and creativity in engineering application of new energy in the new generation.