Chem-E-Car

According to the competition's official rules, students must design small-scale automobiles that operate by chemical means, along with a poster describing their research.

[1] Some ideas for chemical reactions have been using pressurized air (creating oxygen through a chemical reaction and allowing it to build pressure) or using electricity created by the dissolving of metals in certain acids (basic battery).

Winners in this competition are not determined by whether their car is faster or more powerful, but how accurate their chemical reaction to stop their vehicle is.

So teams must find a method that is flexible enough to fit a range of distances, and reliable enough so it does not fail with real world variables (temperature, humidity, track roughness, changes in elevation, etc.).

Winners in the past have had a variety of ways of dealing with this problem, such as an iodine clock reaction.