The zinc-air battery team has been part of chemE car for several years and performed at both the regional and national competitions. The components of the battery include a zinc anode, a carbon-based cathode that captures oxygen from air, and potassium hydroxide electrolyte. Our main goals for this year include researching and testing new improvements to our battery while focusing on calibration and consistency to excel at competition.

The Magnesium-Air battery operates with an AZ31 alloy anode, air cathode, and a Magnesium electrolyte compound. The reaction mechanism is:

      Anode:        Mg_(s) → Mg²⁺_(aq) + 2e^-                               E° = +2.37 V

      Cathode:     O_{2 (g)} + 2H₂O_(l) + 4e^- → 4OH^-                      E° = +0.73 V

      Overall:       2Mg_(s) + O_{2 (g)} + 2H₂O_(l) → 2Mg(OH)_2(s)     E° = +3.1 V

The main focus for this year is to optimize the performance of the electrolyte compound in order to maximize the longevity and energy density of the cell. In doing so, we shall be testing various Magnesium electrolytes as well as organic solvents for the electrochemical systems.

We are developing a lead-acid battery to power our car. The chemical energy in a lead-acid battery is stored in the potential difference between the two lead plates (PbSO₄ and PbO₂), and our goal is to harness this energy to provide power to the motor of our car. Some of the projects we are working on are determining optimal cell arrangement, characterizing energy and power density, and cycling degradation.

This is the first year that Hydrogen Fuel Cell is able to do lab work, so our goal is to give members an interesting and safe experience working with an experimental team. Since we don't have an experimentally verified procedure, a lot of our work will consist of tweaking procedures from literature searches to create a working pouch fuel cell. Members will learn how to problem solve and troubleshoot when adapting and replicating literature procedures.

Vitamin C Clock studies the reaction between ascorbic acid, iodide, and hydrogen peroxide. By manipulating concentrations of ascorbic acid and iodine, we can change the rate of reaction, and our goal is to create a reliable calibration curve of the reaction.

The Electrochemical Clock team is brand new and looking for innovation. The team was founded in Covid, so this is the first semester we will be in lab. There is no set mechanism or procedure, thus this semester we will be focusing on exploring electrochemistry and how we might harness it in a clock. It will be up to the members of the team to design clock mechanisms from scratch. By the end of the semester, the team should choose a basic clock mechanism that we can then optimize further.

The enzymatic clock team utilizes the reaction between hydrogen peroxide and catalase. As hydrogen peroxide is injected into a flask containing catalase solution, oxygen and water are formed. The oxygen gas will continuously push an attached syringe's plunger outward, and at the end of the plunger, there is a conductive material – once the plunger has moved far enough, it will complete a broken circuit and send a signal to the car to stop. Our goals are to develop a competition-ready calibration curve for the stopping time of the car, and to design and perfect the mentioned apparatus.

The electrical team devises ways of converting the Control Teams’ data into voltages so that we can determine whether the car should be running or not. Using this data, we turn on and off the power supplied by the Power & Battery Teams to the motor. Currently, we are trying to convert to using an Arduino Nano, as well as increasing data collection for the different teams by measuring voltage and current from the batteries as well as measuring the time it takes to go a certain distance to calculate a more accurate velocity.