South Ural State University is known as a school who trains the strongest engineering specialists for good reason. Students of the second and third years of study create race cars for competition under the leadership of the team captain – master’s student Grigoriy Salimonenko.
“Everything began in 2011 when the team was called ‘Heart of the Urals’ and created the first vehicle. The team turned out to be the pioneer of this work in the Ural region. In addition, they were the first in Russia to use composite materials – carbon - in their building. Even Moscow hasn’t used these materials yet,” says the master’s student.
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After the debut of the SUSU team Heart of the Urals, teams began to form in Tyumen and Yekaterinburg. The appearance of competition among neighbors enabled the development of this area at SUSU, and the team Formula Student, formed less than three years ago, is surprising with its construction solutions.
For this time, the team has achieved good results – they created and launched a race car with an internal combustion engine.
“This project is excellent practice! We got great work experience; we formed this project from scratch. We constantly consulted with specialists – industrial engineers and builders. There were many mistakes in the project, when forming it and in the technical documents. We had to constantly work on corrections and improve the project. We really wanted to build a car, and we did it!” notes the young engineer.
According to participants, team creation is no less an important part than building the car. 20 volunteers gathered to design the race car in the beginning, however in the middle of the process there already only 8.
“The beginning was the most difficult, when you still don’t know the potential of your teammates and what tasks to give them. We try to find interesting work for each person. It is great that our project brings students together from all majors, not just industrial engineers. Each person feels like a part of a big machine that can’t function without you,” added Grigoriy Salimonenko.
The whole process, from project creation to execution, took the student team 5 months. This became possible because of support from partner DST-Ural. Towards the end of the project, each member felt like a real professional.
“SUSU rector Aleksandr Shestakov gives us the chance to travel to forums in Moscow where all of the Russian teams joins. There, we both gather ideas and talk about ourselves,” continues the engineer.
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Competitions in Tyumen and the Russian Stage in Moscow are waiting for the race car and its founders. The guys plan on building an electrical race car which will be their pass to competitions on an international level. In addition, they plan on moving to a new level of developing their design bureau – make it an official place for students’ practices.