Bluebird Electric Vehicle Designed for Speed 

Manufacturing at small-scale comes with a specific set of technological hurdles, as does vehicle design. When a car is being developed to go beyond existing speed boundaries, as is the case with the Bluebird electric vehicle, there are additional challenges.

The Bluebird family, which has been setting land and water records since the 1920s, is now focused on breaking the 500mph speed barrier for an electric vehicle. The team scheduled a test event for August 13-14 at Pendine Sands in Carmarthenshire, Wales, to get a sense of how close the Bluebird Electric vehicle currently is to its lofty goal.

The Bluebird Electric team is working with a number of suppliers to create a vehicle with exacting design standards. Due to the importance of obtaining precise measurements, Blue chose white light measurement specialist Phase Vision as its metrology partner on the project.

According to the metrology specialists, "Phase Vision's Quartz white light scanners use unique sine wave technology which projects a series of light stripes onto the object and uses an integral camera to develop a complete representation based on millions of points, to an accuracy of a few microns, in just a few seconds – far more rapidly than would be the case with a laser scanner or co-ordinate measuring machine."

Bluebird Project Director Martin Rees reported on the new technology partnership, "It is difficult to capture accurate as-built data on a vehicle as large as Bluebird – which is 21 feet long and characterised by some very complex aerodynamic shapes. As a result we did not have access to this data in our previous successful record-breaking attempts, and could not use it in the FEA analysis of the car. Using the Phase Vision Quartz scanner, we managed to capture that data very quickly, and we will be using it to identify areas for improvement as we move towards the 500mph challenge car."

The BlueBird team set out to break the land speed record on August 14, but their attempts were hampered after the car sustained damage when it hit a pothole, as reported in Get Surrey. The group plans to experiment with different battery technologies and drive units to hit its 500 mph goal in 2013.