AmSnow.com is now SnoWest.com
The SAE “Clean Snowmobile Challenge” celebrated its 10th competition at Michigan Tech University in Houghton, Mich., last season. The program has been successful and serves an important role in educating future engineers and leads to several technical advancements for the snowmobile industry and beyond.
The Clean Snowmobile Challenge receives wide industry support with help from all four of the snowmobile manufacturers, plus 100 additional industry sponsors including big names such as Hayes Brakes. The first “Clean Snowmobile Challenge” was staged in West Yellowstone in 2000, by local environmental interests and remained there for three years before it became an SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) student competition and moved to Michigan Tech on the Keweenaw Peninsula.
The Program Michigan Tech has a long and storied experience as a snowmobile testing facility from back in the 1970s, because of its location which receives massive quantities of lake effect snow from Lake Superior from November through April. When I was an engineer in the Evinrude Snowmobile Division in the early 1970s, the school ran a test center for us a few miles south of Houghton. We used the facility until the middle of April each year, before we moved spring testing to Centennial, Wyo., and tested in the “Snowies.”
Each year the Clean Snowmobile Challenge takes place mid-March, an ideal time when snow is still plentiful, but temperatures are starting to moderate. SAE student competitions are highly popular with universities in the U.S., Canada and Europe, and sometimes attract competitors from India, China, Korea and Japan, depending on the specialty.
There are now SAE competitions for Formula Cars, Off-road Baja Cars, Electric Cars, Extreme Fuel Economy, Agricultural Tractors, etc. The programs are intended as an accelerated engineering activity where students experience teamwork, problem solving, research and development programs as well as design and manufacturing of vehicles and subsystems. As a result, the industry gets engineers with better problem solving skills and practical experience in design and fabrication. This is much favored by manufacturers who are eager to support the programs and often recruit the best students.
A couple of years ago I talked to one engineer who had been hired because of his involvement in the Challenge, and is now deeply involved with the emissions program at Arctic Cat. Many may think the main emphasis of the program is to develop new technology. This is not necessarily so, from the university’s perspective. The program’s main emphasis is enhancing the learning experience for the students by developing real world problem-solving skill.