热点大瓜

By Elizabeth Egan

The competition took place in Virginia Beach at the First Landing State Park in April. Teams were tasked with building an electric boat that was either crewed or uncrewed. The crewed boat team had to complete a five mile course with one member of the team driving the vessel. The uncrewed boat had to complete a two mile course with the entire team watching from the shore.

The two teams of formed during the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering’s MAE 451 Senior Design course. The MAE seniors are assigned a project to work on over two semesters. Both teams ranked the electric propulsion competition as their first choice.

The students spent the fall semester planning their design to prepare for the spring semester when they would have to build their boats.

The crewed boat team was led by Ryan Donohue and included Hunter Jurek, Nick Baubie, Andrew Rice, Jonathan Reggi and Nolan Rogers.

The team received $5,000 from the competition and another $500 from the senior design class and pulled off a victory despite competing against teams with budgets up to $150,000.

The team chose a catamaran design, with Donohue noting that they liked the simple and stable design because it was something they could build upon.

The team purchased a hull on Facebook Marketplace and then used the skills of each team member to build it into an electric boat that they were confident would make it through the five-mile course.

Donohue noted that he utilized experience from a job fixing guitars to do the necessary soldering work on the boat and that all team members were able to utilize skills from various engineering courses that they had taken at the University at Buffalo.

While the team was working with a limited budget, Donohue believes it was their focus on reliability that put them ahead in the competition. They were able to test their boat in Lake LaSalle the week before the competition, allowing them to head to Virginia with the knowledge that their boat would be able to at least finish the race. Donohue said their emphasis on reliability over speed played a significant role in their win, as other schools were unable to complete the entire race.

The Uncrewed Boat Team was led by Jacob DiFrancesco and included Aidan Nabinger, Penny Spier, Eric Sandle, Van Valencia and Drew Vickery.

The team had to make at least three changes to the design from the boat used by UB in the previous year’s competition, so they opted to change from a catamaran design to a from a V-shape monohull, added a second motor and doubled the length to help the boat make it through the waves.

The team also decided to build their boat’s hull by hand in order to save money and to customize the hull to their specifications. DiFrancesco said that it took two attempts of laying fiberglass with epoxy to produce the hull that would eventually be ready to use in the competition. For the final product, they used a polyurethane foam mold that was made based on a SolidWorks computer-aided design model. The team named the final version of their hull, "Furnas".

DiFrancesco noted that project management and hands on building skills from building much of the boat from scratch were two of the main skills he took away from the experience.

“In the end, through serious grit and determination, we built an exceptional boat that survived the two-mile course of winds and choppy waters, where many boat did not even qualify,” said DiFrancesco.