CCNY's victorious Chem-E-Car team with "Sulfurious" (center).
City College of New York’s Chem-E- Car team is once again the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Mid-Atlantic champion. “Sulfurious,” CCNY’s latest entrant, beat out vehicles from 23 other schools to scoop first place in the regional Chem-E- Car competition at Rowan University for the second year running.
The Grove School of Engineering student-designed car finished ahead of a field including two entries each from Carnegie Mellon and NYU; Columbia University, Johns Hopkins and New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Next stop for Sulfurious is the 2017 AIChE Annual Meeting, Oct. 29 – Nov. 3, in Minneapolis. There qualifiers from around the world will compete in the Chem-E- Car international finals.
Sulfurious’ trip to Minneapolis will be the fifth straight by a CCNY team to the AIChE finals. Their honors include a second place finish in 2013 with “REAKTER,” and Spirit of Competition awards in 2015 with “RuSTi” and 2016 with “Iodonator.”
“Chem-E-Car competitions require students to design and build shoe-box sized vehicles that run and stop by chemical reactions,” said Elizabeth Biddinger, the CCNY team faculty advisor.
According to team captain Shakir Julien, a chemical engineering junior, the car’s name is derived from the “Too Fast, Too Furious” movie franchise and the main element in the stopping mechanism, sulfur. Sulfurious runs on a nickel-zinc battery, developed in partnership with the CCNY-based CUNY Energy Institute.
The team to the Mid-Atlantic regionals comprised (all chemical engineering unless indicated):
- Captain Oswald Shakir Julien;
- Co-captain Karlas Christopher;
- Co-captain Nannette Hernandez;
- Hamad Haider;
- Noor Hossain;
- Sana Ilyas;
- Yash Patel;
- Silvija Skemaite;
- Stephan Smith;
- Leo Strauss (electrical engineering); and
- Eric Tung.
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