UPES students added yet another feather to the University cap by virtue of being the only qualifying team from the State and securing the second position in an all India competition called “National Eco Kart Championship 2014” organised by the SAE (Society of Automobile Engineers) in collaboration with Gautam Budh University (GUB), Noida. The first place was awarded to Vindya Institute of Technology from Indore.
Explaining the details of this competition, the Director (Media Affairs) Arun Dhand informed that SAE encourages students to inculcate and imbibe the entrepreneurial skills through such competitions across colleges in the country where students are pursuing their technical Degree / Diploma courses . “Eco Kart 2014” was another such competition organized by them under the ‘Go Green Concept’. The task of this competition was to Design, Develop and Fabricate a single passenger kart which is powered by an AC or DC Motor having batteries as the source of energy. A set of rules were provided to all the participating teams right in the beginning wherein parameters of various technical aspects of the vehicle to be designed and constructed were given.
To encourage the innovative spirit restriction was placed on the usage of traditional materials for building the chassis, thereby forcing the students to use alternative materials and alloys. A total of 71 Engineering Institutes participated in this national competition. The First qualifying round was the virtual round which was presentation of the basic design based on the specified technical parameters including Self weight of the vehicle, Ground clearance, Wheel Base, Power of the Driving Motor and above all the cost factor.
Only 33 teams out of the 71 were able to qualify this round. These 33 teams were given the clearance to fabricate their respective vehicles in their campuses in a given time frame and were given a specified date to reach the campus of GBU with the vehicles to go through the Dynamic rounds which included technical Inspection and field testing of the vehicles.