ME Students win $20,000 at LITECAR challenge
April 24, 2015
STARKVILLE, Miss.—Three Bagley College of Engineering students won $20,000 in the Lightweighting Technologies Enabling Comprehensive Automotive Redesign (LITECAR) challenge.
The mechanical engineering majors, David Francis, Kyle Johnson and Willburn Whittington, placed third out of 254 entries from across the globe in the challenge funded by Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
The LITECAR competition asked teams to create a lightweight, safe car using state-of-the-art materials, techniques and technologies for a chance to win a share of $150,000 in prize money.
Francis, a postdoctoral student, said the Mississippi State design proposed using non-traditional composite manufacturing techniques to create automotive body panels from metal matrix metallic composites. The team drew inspiration from other industries that are using lightweight structures to solve similar multi-objective problems.
“We wanted to propose something that could quickly make an impact in manufacturing,” Francis said.
Mechanical engineering department head Pedro Mago said he is proud of the students’ hard work and dedication to achieve this honor.
“They are a great example of the high-quality mechanical engineers we are producing at Mississippi State,” Mago said.
More information about the competition can be found at www.localmotors.com/arpa-e/litecar-challenge.
For more information about the Bagley College of Engineering, visit www.bagley.msstate.edu.
By: Emile Creel
From left to right: Wilburn Whittington (ME Ph.D. student), Dr. Hongjoo Rhee (CAVS Associate Director and Associate Research Professor), Dr. David Francis (Postdoctoral Research Associate and ME Ph.D. graduate), and Kyle Johnson (ME Ph.D. student)