Climate anxiety affects nearly half of young people aged 16-25. Students like second-year Rachel Mohammed find hope and inspiration through her involvement in innovative climate solutions, working alongside peers who share her determination. “I’ve met so many people at MIT who are dedicated to finding climate solutions in ways that I had never imagined, dreamed of, or heard of. That is what keeps me going, and I’m doing my part,” she says.

Hydrogen-fueled engines

Hydrogen offers the potential for zero or near-zero emissions, with the ability to reduce greenhouse gases and pollution by 29 percent. However, the hydrogen industry faces many challenges related to storage solutions and costs.

Mohammed leads the hydrogen team on MIT’s Electric Vehicle Team (EVT), which is dedicated to harnessing hydrogen power to build a cleaner, more sustainable future. EVT is one of several student-led build teams at the Edgerton Center focused on innovative climate solutions. Since its founding in 1992, the Edgerton Center has been a hub for MIT students to bring their ideas to life.

Hydrogen is mostly used in large vehicles like trucks and planes because it requires a lot of storage space. EVT is building their second iteration of a motorcycle based on what Mohammed calls a “goofy hypothesis” that you can use hydrogen to power a small vehicle. The team employs a hydrogen fuel cell system, which generates electricity by combining hydrogen with oxygen. However, the technology faces challenges, particularly in storage, which EVT is tackling with innovative designs for smaller vehicles.

Presenting at the 2024 World Hydrogen Summit reaffirmed Mohammed’s confidence in this project. “I often encounter skepticism, with people saying it’s not practical. Seeing others actively working on similar initiatives made me realize that we can do it too,” Mohammed says.

The team’s first successful track test last October allowed them to evaluate the real-world performance of their hydrogen-powered motorcycle, marking a crucial step in proving the feasibility and efficiency of their design.

MIT’s Sustainable Engine Team (SET), founded by junior Charles Yong, uses the combustion method to generate energy with hydrogen. This is a promising technology route for high-power-density applications, like aviation, but Yong believes it hasn’t received enough attention. Yong explains, “In the hydrogen power industry, startups choose fuel cell routes instead of combustion because gas turbine industry giants are 50 years ahead. However, these giants are moving very slowly toward hydrogen due to its not-yet-fully-developed infrastructure. Working under the Edgerton Center allows us to take risks and explore advanced tech directions to demonstrate that hydrogen combustion can be readily available.”

Both EVT and SET are publishing their research and providing detailed instructions for anyone interested in replicating their results.

While siblings Kevin Chan ’17 and rising senior Monica Chan may be seven years apart in age, as Monica Chan puts it, “we’re eight grades apart, so, like, eight life-years apart.”

Despite this age gap — Kevin left for college when Monica was in fifth grade — the siblings share remarkably similar experiences and interests. Both led subteams on the MIT Motorsports team, albeit eight years apart. Kevin was the electrical systems lead from 2015 to 2017, and Monica is the current software lead.

Founded in 2001 by Rich James ’04, SM '06 and Nick Gidwani ’04, and supported by the Edgerton Center, MIT Motorsports designs and builds a high-caliber Formula SAE car to race in yearly competitions. Over the past 23 years, MIT Motorsports has built 19 cars, won 10 trophies, and has had hundreds of team members. Alumni are die-hard fans and established an endowed fund for their 20th anniversary to ensure the team’s longevity. In 2017, Kevin’s team won Second Place Overall at the Formula SAE Electric competition in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Kevin was one of two electrical engineering students on the team, and today Monica oversees a subteam of 10 students. The subteam expansion has facilitated the development of a custom telemetry system. “You can view live data coming off of the car that’s transmitted through radio, and we have a custom dashboard that we created with a custom PCB that transmits all that data now,” Monica says. 

“It’s so funny to hear Monica talking about this, because when I was on the team, our UI [user interface] for the driver and everything was so simple. It was just a little, single-line display that showed the max cell temperature and minimum cell voltage,” Kevin chuckles. “And then we literally had a sticky note on the dashboard that was like, do not go above this temperature. Do not go below this voltage.”

While at MIT, Kevin kept up with his sister weekly, updating her on everything happening at Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (FSAE). “A big piece of advice Kevin gave me when I was a junior in high school was that you’re never too young to do something amazing,” Monica says. “He told me back then that ‘you're not going to be much smarter two years from now than you are now.’ That piece of advice helped me get through high school and pushed me to do my best to do the hard and difficult things because indeed, it’s more about the personal qualities you have that push you to do the hard projects. Knowledge can always be acquired, but the drive is the harder part.”

Traditions are part of the fabric of the team culture. Their team stretch at the end of every meeting is an enduring tradition. “Everyone just extends their arms out while standing up and then does a squat. Then, they clap. This is just a thing that has been done on the team since before I was on the team. They said that the origin of it was the stretch that Japanese autoworkers do at the beginning of the day to stretch out their jumpsuits in the factory and make the knees a little bit more flexible. And it’s just fascinating, because this stretch is now almost 20 years old on the team,” Kevin says.

“Hitting Roman,” the day the car first rolls, is an important milestone. “When I was on the team, we were convinced that saying that the car was going to run was bad luck,” Kevin says. “We were trying to come up with a new term to replace the term ‘running car’ because we thought that saying the words ‘running car’ would make it so that the car never ran. So instead of calling it a running car, we called it ‘Roman Chariot.’” The name stuck, and Monica’s team hit Roman in April.

For Kevin, the spirit of Motorsports remains ever-present, as he shares his home with four Motorsports alums and collaborates with three Motorsports alums at Tesla, where he serves as a staff energy systems design/architecture engineer.

“FSAE and the Edgerton Center played a huge role in jump starting my career and my internships. I think there’s not many places where you can get both the breadth and the depth of the design process,” Kevin says.

For Monica, “Race car puts many things in perspective where you implement a lot of the things that you learn in class into a physical project. Sometimes I learn things through race car before I learn them in class. And then when I go back to class, it gives me a better physical intuition for how something works because I have experience implementing it.”

The team recently returned from the Formula Hybrid competition in Loudon, New Hampshire, where they finished first in design, first in scrutineering [mandatory technical, safety, and administrative checks], second in acceleration, third in the racing challenge, fourth in project management, and fifth overall. Edgerton Center Technical Instructor Pat McAtamney reports, “I’ve never seen a team complete a brakes test in one try.”