Dayton Engineer

It’s no secret that UD students are committed, collaborative — and enjoy a friendly competition. 

Students in the School of Engineering’s Solar Splash team agree.

The team competed for the first time in 5 years this June, building a solar-powered boat from scratch over the past two academic years. The club had been stagnant for a few years, until a group of students, including past-president Cory Howley, were interested in bringing new life to the organization.

“The process of getting the club running again has been ongoing since I joined as a freshman in fall of 2021. The most difficult part was definitely getting momentum to start and making the transition from talking about what we wanted to do, to actually doing it,” Howley said. “Over time, we picked up the pace on our work because we were starting to see the outcomes of our hard work, and other people started to see too. It also helped that we were moving through our studies and becoming more competent engineers and leaders through it.”

Their first task was to build the hull, which they completed with donated plans from Salt Boatworks. Then, they received a motor from DHX Machines.

“In the fall of 2022 and spring of 2023, we worked on it for 2 hours a week or so, but then in the fall of 2023 we increased the time spent weekly to 5-10 hours for the first 2 months of the semester to finish it,” Howley said. 

Before leaving for the competition from June 4-8 at Champions Lake in Springfield, the team charged all batteries and made their final fixes. Once the competition started, they could only use the solar panels on their boat.

They passed initial inspections with minor changes before mingling with other teams. The competition began with 3 events to test different aspects of the boat’s design — 3 rounds of a 300-meter sprint, 2 rounds of a slalom event maneuvering around 4 buoys and 2 rounds of a 2- hour endurance event. 

Although they ran in to a handful of problems — propeller falling off and diving down to retrieve it, losing power because of a connector not being secure, a key missing from the outboard and the propeller falling off again and borrowing one from another team — they still finished the competition with a smile on their faces. 

The Solar Splash team placed 6th out of 8 teams, in addition to receiving the teamwork award. 

“We were able to work together quickly and effectively throughout the week to address the many issues that we faced, and have a lot of fun doing it, which was recognized by the judges,” Howley said. “We were also able to show that we, as a team of rookie members, were able to hold our own against teams that had been competing multiple years previously.”

Their success and perseverance wasn’t possible without the commitment of their fellow students, faculty advisers Drs. Dave Perkins and Rydge Mulford and support from the School of Engineering Dean’s Office.

Howley, a chemical engineering major, was the leader in submitting a student-written proposal for the Accelerating Curriculum Transformation grant. The grant provided engineering competition clubs with funding to support their competition fees and was an important part of the team’s final goal to take their boat to competition. 

For their next competition, the team is looking forward to improving the outboard and propeller first. 

“Our outboard and propeller were repurposed from a 4-horsepower combustion engine and couldn't properly utilize the ~25 hp that our electric motor could provide. As a result, our boat was slow compared to others, which was our biggest weakness in competition. I think that change alone will improve our boat significantly from where we were this year.” Howley said.

Follow their future endeavors on the Solar Splash social media!

Instagram: @udsolarsplash

LinkedIn & Facebook: University of Dayton Solar Splash