Thursday was the first day we all were allowed to sleep a little bit longer, this was very welcome for everyone. The past few days with all the hard work during the day and the parties at night were very demanding, but great fun too. After the good night rest there was the second case-study exercise, this time presented by Elia. Elia is a company that provides a high voltages electricity distribution network. Our task was to figure out how to implement new ‘green’ energy sources in the existing network. We worked an hour or two on our solution and presentation, and felt confident with our solution. The presentation went well and we felt pretty good about it. After the lunch they announced the winner, KU Leuven has - again - won this event.
In the afternoon the main event from this year’s EBEC was planned, the presentation and demonstration of the Team Design exercise, I think everybody was quite nervous about that. The tension had only gone up after the first group had done their presentation. They only managed to load the water and make half a turn in 10 minutes. We were up next. The start went very well and we were fast in the straight line to the water tank. Our loading system performed brilliantly and after only three and a half minutes we were already at the first candle. But then things got a bit nasty for us, we didn’t think aiming would be so hard. Our KISS-Mobil had no separate aiming device, which we seemed to need. So we just did the best we could, aimed for the candle and took the shot. Unfortunately we missed, now we had to reposition the whole car to try again. After we have moved the car a bit we tried again, but we failed again. We found the flaw in our design; we didn’t have an aiming device. We filled the remaining time with trying to hit a candle but we didn’t succeed. Only very short after the 10 minutes demonstration time, one candle went out (because of the water we got into the wax). After this we all were a bit disappointed, we had worked hard, everything went fine except one vital step. But after everyone’s demonstration we felt much better, only one group had managed to put out the 4 candles. Guess who? KU Leuven!
After the demonstrations of the main team design exercise, we were free for a few hours. So we decided to relax a bit in the sauna. But we were relaxing a bit too much and lost track of time. Suddenly someone from the organization told us we had to be in the main room for the prize ceremony and gala afterwards. We rushed out the sauna, a quick shower and then suited-up in 5 minutes. It was from super relaxed in the sauna to stress of rushing and of course also for the rankings. It was time to hear how we did, we didn’t have high expectations, we were here to have fun and do our best. After some speeches, the top three of the first study case exercise was announced. “1: KU Leven, 2: TU Delft…” “What!? We came second!!!! Amazing!”. What a nice surprise. Then, they announced the ranking of the first team design assignment, we knew we won’t be high up in that one. No top three there. Then the second case study ranking came up. For this assignment we expected to be relatively high up, and we were right. We came second again. What a great result up till now. For the last ranking the tension rose in the room, this was the main event. Everyone knew that KU Leuven had won, because they were the only team that succeeded. Actually they dominated the whole event; they almost won everything, the one thing they didn’t win, they came second. But it was still important who came second and third for the main team design. What a surprise again, we came second again. YES WE CAN! What a great feeling. We came here to have fun, and did such a great job. We were all very excited and the best news still had to come. Because KU Leuven had won overall in team design and case study, they had to choose in which category they wanted to participate at EBEC. They decided to go for the team design competition. This was great news for us, because we were runner-up in the case study overall ranking. We would go to Cluj! WHAT??? We can go to Cluj? This is amazing, what a surprise! We were thrilled. After some phone calls home, we enjoyed a nice gala evening with free champagne. Then we had a relatively early night
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