ITS Spectronics team succeeded in making Indonesia proud by winning the general champion at 2019 Chemeca event in Sydney, Australia

ITS Campus, ITS News – As if never bored to make Indonesia proud in international scene, the Spektronics Team of Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS) was once again successful in carrying the international championship title. This award-winning achievement was inscribed from the prototype of a chemical reaction fueled car competition of 2019 Chemeca as the general champion in Sydney, Australia, Tuesday (1/10).

ITS Spectronics team succeeded in finishing the race by winning first place in the race category and second place in the poster category. With the total value, the team was also crowned as the general champion in this annual international scale competition.

Chemeca itself is a conference for chemical engineers and from various other fields. One of the main activities in this conference was the chem-E-car competition, which is a prototype of a car with chemical reaction energy. The delegation of ITS Spectronics Team was represented by Satrya Fuad Afif Sulistiyo, Widi Citra Lestari, Evan Mika Subnafeu, Kharisma Perdana Setiawan, and Tiara Mahendra Kurniawati.

After a three-years vacuum from the competition, the team that brought a car breakthrough named Spektronics Aerio Superior (AS) succeeded in surpassing other participants, almost in all aspects. Spektronics is only slightly below the University of Queensland Australia in the poster category.

In the race category itself, the ITS Chem-E-Car team was the best with an error of only 53 centimeters. Following the rules of the race, the team with the least number of errors and able to travel the farthest distance will be declared as the winner.

Satrya Fuad Afif Sulistiyo, the team manager, expressed his pride and happiness, as they succeeded in making the campus and the nation proud in this competition. Moreover, the Spektronics team won the Chemeca last time when it was held in Adelaide in 2016. “So we are also proud because we are still able to prove that ITS can compete with Australian, Singapore, and so on,” said this chemical engineering student when contacted via online message, Tuesday (1/10).

Explained by the student who is familiarly called Fuad, the Spektronics team registered for the competition on Sunday (29/9) and started competing and poster presentations two days later, on Tuesday (1/10). According to Fuad, the interesting thing about this race was that all participants got a surprise from the organizer in the form of a track arena with a surface of a carpet covered with plastic.

Although the Spektronics team itself has prepared for such possibilities, the track race, was very bumpy. “So we felt the need to re-calculate for the volume of reactants needed,” he explained.

In the first attempt, Fuad told us that the Spektronics AS car had a stop distance before the finish line or the same error as the car belonging to the University of Sydney, which was 65 centimeters. This made Spektronics encouraged because they felt there was no room to make mistakes anymore. Until the second attempt, the team recalibrated the data, so that the error can be reduced to 53 centimeters, while the Univesity of Sydney has not managed to do the same thing.

ITS Spektronics Team with their car, Spektronics AS, that won the general champion at 2019 Chemeca event in Sydney, Australia

Fuad who is also a member of the Spektronics technical team revealed the biggest challenge they encountered was the track surface that forced his team to modify the car tire to avoid slippage. Furthermore, finding the suitable track material for training and tire materials for the competition was quite troublesome for their team. Moreover, they have to go around at some hardware stores in a foreign country.

Thanks to this achievement, more achievements were engraved by the ITS Spektronics team. After approximately one year of preparation, the struggle of the team that supervised by Setiyo Gunawan ST Ph.D. finally gave a result. After this, Fuad divulged that the Spektronics team was going to pursue a champion title at the ICECC 2020 and AIChe 2020 competitions. “We are optimistic that we can make Indonesian more proud and bring home the trophy for ITS,” he said confidently. (dik/gayatri/ITS Public Relation)