The NIU’s Supermileage team is on a roll again. The team of engineering students at NIU’s College of Engineering and Engineering Technology (CEET) won third place in the international SAE Supermileage competition this past June.
SAE Supermileage is a competition for teams of engineering undergraduate and graduate students. The teams work to build the most fuel-efficient single-person vehicle possible. Typically, teams compete to see which vehicle can travel the farthest on a gallon of gas. This year the competition was held virtually with teams presenting written and verbal presentations due to the pandemic.
NIU’s Supermileage team started in 2008. Each year, the Supermileage team has worked to improve energy efficiency while maintaining or improving safety. This year, NIU’s team of 22 undergraduate students along with team advisor David Schroeder, Ph.D., spent nine months on design development, analysis, and fabrication of their primary project.
This year’s achievement was not the team’s first successful lap around the track. In 2019 the team won top honors in the overall efficiency category for its gasoline-powered vehicle that traveled 1,525 miles on one gallon of gas at the Shell Eco-Marathon Americas competition at Sonoma Raceway. The team also consistently placed in the top three at SAE for eight of the 11 years in which it has competed, with the team’s highest mileage being 1,888 MPG in 2018.
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