Success and disappointment for Teesing-sponsored student teams

Eco-runner claims a prize

Good news as concerns the Eco-runner team. 174 teams competed in the Eco-Marathon this year, from 24 countries. The Eco-runners entered the endurance race with their hydrogen-powered car made more efficient with a driving strategy based on an intelligent ‘neural network’. This system allowed for optimalization of the route on the basis of the time, speed and position of the vehicle plus unexpected variables. In the end, the Eco-runner car ended a very respectable 3rd with 683,7 km on the equivalent of 1 l of fuel.

Dare doing forensic investigation

Stratos III ended its journey through the atmosphere less fortuitously. The run-up to the rocket launch was marked by some set-backs and postponements – the weather was a contributing factor. Finally launch day was set for the 25th and all seemed to go well until 20 seconds after take-off when the Stratos III rocket had reached an altitude of 11 km. It suddenly disintegrated and fell into the ocean in pieces. The team is now busy reconstructing the flight and will write up a forensic report detailing what went wrong. As the Stratos team says: ‘we’re doing rocket science’ (which is of course a colorful and apt way of saying ‘extremely difficult’ – hence prone to failure).

Technical experiance

In both cases, we at Teesing are happy to see these bright young people steadily and unrelentingly working away at achieving technical excellence.