A small scale car designed and run by Purdue ChE undergraduate students finished second out of twelve teams with a net distance of 11 inches from the finish line. The Chem-E Car Competition is organized by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). The 2012 Regional competition for the North-Central division was held at Akron University in April.  The top five teams qualified for the national competition, which will be held in Pittsburgh in October 2012.

Pictures from the regional event can be found here.

Below is an overview of the main rules stipulated by AIChE:

• Each team must build a roughly shoebox-sized car which starts and stops entirely as a function of a chemical reaction
• Performance is based on how close each team's car comes to the finish line, in other words, the team with the smallest net distance from the line is the winner
• The distance to the finish line is announced the day of the competition and then each team is given 1 hour to calibrate/measure reactants accordingly
• Each team is given 2 attempts

More details about the rules can be found at http://www.aiche.org/students/awards/ChemeCar.aspx