We decided to trailer to Dunmarra to try to get ahead of the control stop closing times, So at 7:40am we trailered to where we marked it yesterday, and with it being past 8am, we just noted the spot (on my GPS) and carried on driving to Dunmara. We got to Dunmarra no long after 11am, unloaded and waited 30 mins at the stop. At that moment the car decided it would not go, despite all our checks the pevious night.We move over to a spot familiar to the Solar Fern team, with the same problems, motor contoller issues. This time it turned out to be the power plug on the controller, yet more trouble with bad connections due to age and storage climate. After that the controller gave us no more trouble! We're solaring again!
Driving on for the first time since tyre and controller problems in Adelaide River (114km from the strat), the car was running much better, but array power seemed very low (400-500W). We knew we had array trouble, but it would take a long time to fix, so we decided to drive on what we had. Running a constant battery current strategy, we calculated we could draw 7-8 Amps for the rest of the day, and stuck to that. Speed was good, exceeding 70kph at times.
One thing about a solarcar running constant battery power is that it's speed changes greatly with hills and sunlight, but it is very easy to manage the battery! A consequence of this is that the solar car can creep up on the forward support vehicle quickly, and in one case a bit too quickly. The solar car had to drive off the left side of the road to miss the support car, almost a Michigan! The side of the road was very rough, and the solar car brakes not so good. As the solar car went through one ditch hard it bounced hard and the canopy poped off, flying at least 5m up in the air. It looked horrific! The solar car came to a stop, and we ran to it's rescue. The driver was unharmed, same with the canopy, and the car appeared to work fine. We pushed it onto the road and started driving again. Later that night we found minor structual damage to the array lattice work
As we drove on, the array power seemed low, and thought it was a results of the big air, but it soon became clear it was not clear, ie haze, bad haze. We slowed down and recalculated our destination, Renner springs. Just before renner springs is a reasonable downhill stretch, so we got our new driver to try regen, just to experience how effective it is for high speed braking. Later as we came into Renner Springs the driver used regen to stop, but of course it did not bring the car to a halt. The foot brake actually cuts regen out, so the driver delibrately did touch the foot brake. Fortunately several team member were able to jump out, grab hold and stop the car in time. We're going to change the cut out switch to allow both at the same time.
That night we tested the array, and found no new cell damage, only minor structual damage. We knew some MPPT's werent going. We canabalised one to fix three. One small string of cells was not working anyway, so we didn't need the last MPPT. We also found serveral dodgy swithces on the trackers, which were fixed with a few cycles.
The chassis was fine, and so were the tyres. We meant to check the alignment of the back wheel and brake disk, but no time.
Fixed MPPT's and radio headset in the morning.
What a day!
194km on solar.
This is where Nuna 3 got to at the end of day 1!!
Weird sunset, with thick haze, no solar potential.
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