Dartmouth Engineer

By Kathryn LoConte

Fourteen student teams traveled from around the world to participate in the second annual Formula Hybrid International Competition in May at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon, N.H. Founded and run by Thayer School to challenge engineering students to create high-performance hybrid race cars, the event drew five more teams than the inaugural year.

This year’s American teams came from Dartmouth, Drexel, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Florida Institute of Technology, Illinois Institute of Technology (two teams), North Carolina State University, University of California-Irvine, University of Vermont, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Yale. McGill University in Canada, National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, and MADI State Technical University in Moscow, Russia, also sent teams.

CAR TALK: Allie Fecych ’07 Th’08 adjusts Thayer’s car at the second annual Formula Hybrid International Competition. In electric-only mode, the car zoomed from zero to 60 mph in 4.5 seconds.

Day one of the three-day competition consisted of technical inspections and design and marketing presentations. Day two featured acceleration runs, the autocross competition, and design finals. The endurance event and awards ceremony were held on day three.

Like last year, McGill placed first overall, Embry-Riddle placed second, and Illinois Institute of Technology finished third.

Dartmouth took first place in presentation, unlimited acceleration, and the electric-only acceleration categories. “When the Dartmouth car did the acceleration run, jaws dropped,” says Thayer professor Charles Sullivan, an advisor to the Dartmouth team. “When it’s in electric-only mode, it sits on the starting line silently, so it’s a shock to see it go 75 meters in under 5 seconds — the equivalent of 0 to 60 mph in about 4.5 seconds.”

Thayer School modeled the Formula Hybrid meet after the Formula SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) competition, in which Dartmouth students have competed for more than a decade. The key difference is that Formula Hybrid limits cars to a fixed amount of fuel. “That’s a challenge that proves difficult to master,” says Thayer research engineer and Formula Hybrid director Douglas Fraser, who organized the competition with colleague Wynne Washburn.

Formula Hybrid’s emphasis on fuel efficiency attracted a growing number of sponsors, including the SAE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Plug In America, Toyota, General Motors, and Chrysler.

The competition provides opportunities for sponsors and students to explore new technological solutions. “We believe that ideas developed for competition today may lead to everyday applications tomorrow,” says Fraser.

Students glean advice from one another, too. “McGill had a great car again,” says Dartmouth team member Calvin Krishen Th’07. “The main thing, though, is that they spent a lot of time testing it. We finished our car too late to be able to work out all of the quirks.” His advice for next year’s team: “Leave plenty of time for testing.”

— Kathryn LoConte is assistant editor at Dartmouth Engineer.

For more photos, visit our Research and Innovations page and our Dartmouth Formula Racing collection on Flickr.

Thayer School’s new Formula Hybrid International Competition raced to inaugural success May 1-3 at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon, N.H.

UP CLOSE: Some 400 middle-schoolers attending the Formula Hybrid competition explored the cars and Dartmouth's vegetable-oil-fueled Big Green Bus. Photograph by Scott Miller.

Student teams from six institutions — Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Florida Institute of Technology, Illinois Institute of Technology, McGill, Yale, and Thayer School — competed in acceleration runs, autocross and endurance events, and design and marketing presentations. McGill emerged as the overall winner, with Embry-Riddle coming in second, and Yale third. Thayer School won the design event and placed second in the presentation event.

“Tina,” the main car of Thayer School’s two entries, gave students a chance to display some quick thinking on the track. When the car suffered a major electrical failure, the team managed to get it running in time to complete 11 of the 32 required endurance laps. And during those laps Tina showed off some impressive speed — averaging eight seconds a lap faster than the next fastest car.

PIT STOP: Abigail Davidson '05 Th'05, an M.E.M. Candidate, works on one of two hybrid race cars Thayer School entered in the inaugural Formula Hybrid International Competition. Photograph by Scott Miller.

Challenging students to design, build, and race cars with gas-electric hybrid drivetrains, Formula Hybrid aims at inspiring students to advance hybrid-engine technology, says Formula Hybrid Director and Thayer School Research Engineer Douglas Fraser. “Students are notoriously able to come up with novel solutions. They don’t go in with preconceived notions. They sometimes launch off in directions that you think, ‘My God, that won’t work,’ and, lo and behold, it does.”

The competition itself was a novel solution to a problem Thayer School students faced in 2003, when they hoped to enter a hybrid race car in that year’s Formula SAE competition. When changes in Formula SAE competition rules essentially disqualified hybrids, the students paved a road of their own: Formula Hybrid™. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) endorsed Formula Hybrid and joined with Thayer School and several other sponsors — including DaimlerChrysler, Toyota, and the U.S. Department of Energy — to underwrite the inaugural competition.

Fuel efficiency and recycling lie at the core of Formula Hybrid. A Formula Hybrid vehicle must use at least 15 percent less gasoline than a comparable “regular” formula race car operated under the same conditions. And unlike the Formula SAE competition, Formula Hybrid encourages teams to use parts of other racecars rather than build everything from scratch.

Formula Hybrid isn’t Thayer’s only green automotive innovation. This year, for the second year in a row, Thayer students entered an ethanol-fueled car in the Formula SAE competition, held May 16-20 at the Ford Michigan Proving Grounds in Romeo, Mich.

As for Formula Hybrid, plans are already underway for next year’s competition. All of this year’s teams have signed up. Not a bad track record.

For more photos visit our Dartmouth Formula Racing collection on Flickr.

PARTNERS: Profs Tillman Gerngross, left, and Charles Hutchinson used yeast to raise a thriving company. Photograph by Joseph Mehling ’69.

When professors Tillman Gerngross and Charles Hutchinson co-founded GlycoFi Inc. in 2000 they knew they were onto something with huge potential. Six years later they found out what their proprietary technology for turning yeast cells into therapeutic protein factories was worth: $400 million.

That’s the price drug manufacturer Merck paid to acquire GlycoFi in June. Citing statistics from the National Venture Capital Association, The Boston Globe reported that “the deal was the third-highest price paid for a private biotechnology firm, and the largest on record to be done in cash.”

The size of the deal reflects the importance of GlycoFi’s scientific breakthroughs. In the September 8, 2006 issue of the journal Science, researchers from GlycoFi, Thayer School, and Dartmouth Medical School announced that they had achieved the complete humanization of the glycosylation pathway in the yeast Pichia pastoris.

“We’ve successfully completed one of the most complex cellular engineering endeavors undertaken to date,” said Gerngross, chief scientific officer of GlycoFi, which is based in Lebanon, N.H.

“Humanizing glycosylation in yeast was a tour de force of genetic engineering, requiring the knockout of four yeast genes and the introduction of over 14 heterologous genes,” said Stephen Hamilton, the lead author of the Science paper and a senior scientist at GlycoFi.

More than half of all drugs currently in development worldwide depend on the genetic engineering of living cells to produce specific recombinant proteins. Most of these proteins require the attachment of sugar structures, a process known as glycosylation, to attain full biological function. Conventionally, these proteins are produced in mammalian cells. But mammalian cells are prone to contamination by pathogens and are expensive to culture, and glycosylation of mammalian cells is hard to control.

GlycoFi engineered strains of yeast to perform controlled, reliable, specific glycosylation, producing proteins with improved therapeutic capabilities. The technology optimizes drug performance while improving manufacturing efficiency.

Glycoengineering Pichia pastoris to produce functional erythropoietin, a protein widely used in treating anemia, was the latest demonstration of GlycoFi’s protein engineering prowess. Earlier this year GlycoFi and Dartmouth researchers published a paper in Nature Biotechnology detailing the role of glycosylation structures on antibodies.

“By engineering yeast to perform the final and most complex step of human glycosylation, we will be able to conduct far more extensive structure-function investigations on a much wider range of therapeutic protein targets,” said Gerngross.

No wonder Merck bought the company. “Our acquisition of GlycoFi’s scientific expertise, patent estate, and robust technology platform is a significant step toward enabling Merck to discover, optimize, and develop novel biologic drugs to serve the needs of patients worldwide,” said Peter S. Kim, president of Merck Research Laboratories.

For Gerngross, who will continue to guide Glycofi’s scientific work, and Hutchinson, who relinquished his CEO duties, the sale to Merck represents the best of both worlds: a profitable end and a promising beginning.

For more photos, visit our Research and Innovations Flickr page.