In March of 2000, just outside of Yellowstone National Park, the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Clean Snowmobile Competition (CSC) was born. It began as a result of increased pressure to ban snowmobiling in national parks due to snowmobile manufactures doing little to meet environmental standards. Now, nine years after the start of the competition, employees from all the top snowmobile manufactures come to the CSC to check out the innovations developed by competitors.
The Snowmobile SAE team from left: Kevin King, Adam Schumacher, Ashley Driver, Brad Hall, Bucky, Nick Rakovec, Michael Maney, Glenn Bower, Michael Peitz and Brian Olenski.
Photo Credit: Summit Camp Staff and Snowmobile SAE TeamUW-Madison joined the CSC in 2002 and now participates in two separate clean snowmobile competitions. The first of these is the internal combustion (IC) competition. In this competition, the team uses their Bucky 750 FX, a modified 2003 Polaris Frontier Classic, powered by a 750cc fourstroke engine that has been redesigned and rebuilt as a flex fuel engine to accept E10 to E85 ethanol.
“This required a lot of sleepless nights, but now, after a few years of doing it, it’s not as painful and we don’t blow up engines nearly as often,” Ethan Brodsky, the team advisor, says. Along with redesigning the engine, the team also designed and built their own custom exhaust system with a three way catalyst to greatly reduce emissions of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons. “With the requirement this year to run E85, we were one of only four teams in the 15 teams competing to pass the CSC emissions test,” Nick Rakovec, the team leader, says.
Reducing noise emissions is another big goal of the CSC, so along with redesigning their muffler the team spent many hours reducing the noise being emitted from the tunnel and track of their Bucky 750 FX. This year, the team plans to improve their IC sled design, starting with the brand new 2007 Polaris FST chassis. Another modification to be incorporated in the 2009 design is a turbocharger. Rakovec anticipates the new and improved Bucky 750 FX will be the fastest sled running a turbo this March.
Three years ago, a new category of “Zero Emissions” was added to the CSC. This category was produced by the National Science Foundation’s need for a vehicle to transport scientists and equipment in pristine areas of the north and south poles for climate and pollution research. Last year, the UW-Madison CSC team decided to enter the Zero Emissions (ZE) category and build a completely electrically powered snow machine dubbed BuckEV. The EV suffix came from the Delphi EV 1 electric motor, which is the power source in this exceptionally fast machine. The team recalls the huge smiles on the judges’ faces at last year’s competition, who were overwhelmingly impressed by the power that the 100 horsepower engine generated. The power to supply this motor results from the 84 28-volt lithium-ion battery packs, sold to the team by Milwaukee Tools—the team’s sponsor last year—at production cost. Together these batteries produce 78 kilowatts of power at 336 volts. “[This] is enough power to run several houses with every single thing in the house running simultaneously. At 6.5 kilowatt-hours you can run 100 65-watt light bulbs for a full hour,” Brodsky says. But BuckEV is not just all brawn. At 50 feet away, this snowmobile emits only 55 decibels, which is roughly the noise level inside the average house.
The BuckEV in front of the US Air Force C-130 that carried it to Greenland for competition.
Photo Credit: Summit Camp Staff and Snowmobile SAE TeamAll the work the team put into BuckEV paid off when they were crowned the 2008 ZE national champion. As a result, they earned a roundtrip ticket to Summit Station, a National Science Foundation (NSF) research station located at the peak of the Greenland ice cap, to test the sled’s potential in aiding arctic research. There the sled remained for two and a half months, traveling a total distance of over 300 miles. Researchers kept logs of every trip on Buck- EV, while the data logger the UW-Madison team had installed on board kept track of its activities. The data showed that BuckEV was able to haul a total of 1,800 pounds, which more than doubles the towing capacity the sled was designed for.
Though BuckEV goes above and beyond the performance specifications that NSF sought after, the costs of building the sled prevent it from becoming readily available. According to Brodsky, the material and component costs range from $60,000 to $90,000, with the EV1 motor and controller alone ringing up at nearly $30,000. The majority of the supplies and components the CSC team uses each year come from recycled components from other engineering projects and industry donations. With the hours of build time required, “[the] snowmobile comes out to 100 to 150 thousand dollars of engineering efforts, which is actually pretty reasonable for building a prototype like this,” Brodsky says. Unfortunately, these costs are still too high for the declining budget of NSF.
On top of impressing the NSF, BuckEV also impressed the natives of Alaska at last fall’s convention. In Alaska, energy isn’t cheap. Gasoline is at $11 to $12 per gallon. Thus, the federal government assists many villages by putting up windmills and providing residents with free electricity. For this reason, it would be economically advantageous for Alaskans to use electric vehicles, which is why one man at the convention even offered to buy BuckEV for $90,000.
“We demonstrate that it’s not that hard to make these vehicles cleaner; yet, the industry protests and says it’s too hard,” Brodsky says. One good example of the CSC impact on the snowmobile industry is the emissions test. Originally developed for the annual competition, the emissions test is now used as an industry-wide standard to test snow machines. “The emissions testing used now for industry was developed over the first three years of this competition,” Brodsky says. “Soon we are going to show everyone that that’s not good enough anymore.”