For the first two weeks of Ramadan, a team of 12 engineers and professors from the Petroleum Institute will be breaking their fast with sushi, miso soup and green tea.
The team has been in Japan since the middle of last month as part of its goal to build the first Emirates vehicle to compete in a solar car challenge.
“This will be hard for us, as not only are the working hours and fasting hours longer there but we will also miss the Ramadan environment here with family and society,” said Dr Fahad Maskari, who is in charge of the institute’s team.
For the mostly Arab team, the novelty of the Japanese diet will be lost at a time when they will be missing what they call “Ramadan food”.
The prayer timings in Japan make the fast 17 hours long.
But Dr Maskari, a professor of engineering, said the time would be essential in the pursuit of the team’s goal.
“The time is critical and short for us to learn, practise and then assemble and test the parts before shipping it to the UAE,” he said.
The team plans to take to the roads in January for the first Abu Dhabi Solar Challenge.
The car will travel for 1,200 kilometres in a race to the finish line outside Abu Dhabi National Exhibitions Centre, to coincide with the opening ceremony of the World Future Energy Summit.
The Petroleum Institute (PI) completed the design of the UAE car this year and has moved on to the assembly part of the project with assistance from Tokai University, the team’s hosts in Japan.
Through collaboration, Dr Maskari said, the PI team and Tokai were learning from each other through experiments and knowledge-sharing.
“They have a lot of experience, so Tokai gave us the baseline of what you can do with a solar car and they gave us the parameters of what you need in the design focus to make it better,” he said. “But we used our own concept and software to enhance it.”
Although very competitive, great camaraderie also exists in solar car circles. This is partly because participants understand that all breakthroughs made in this technology are beneficial to everyone.
“In the solar car community there is a spirit of sharing, so some universities post their information online,” he said. The PI team has a schedule filled with meetings and practice sessions with the car, fabrication, assembly and maintenance of the car’s body parts.
The team has organised meetings with various companies, including some of Japan’s top manufacturing and energy companies, to receive training and gain a better understanding of how components translate to higher performance.
“We’ll be visiting lots of places, like Honda, Toyota and several universities with their own solar cars, to add to our knowledge,” Dr Maskari said.
“It’s a different mode of competition, but you see the Japanese are very good at sharing information.”
This is Dr Maskari’s fourth trip to Japan.
“We are interested in being in Japan because the manufacturing is there, and we need to see it for ourselves, and not just to see it but to get training,” he said.
The cars’ panels generate about as much power as a hairdryer, but advanced aerodynamics and lightweight materials propel the vehicle beyond 100kph.
The solar car challenge began in 1982 when Dr Hans Tholstrup, president of the International Solarcar Federation and organiser of the first World Solar Challenge in 1987, drove a vehicle from the east to the west coast of Australia in 20 days.
Realising the potential, the Dane invited competition the same year.
nalwasmi@thenational.ae
