MechSE’s Electric Boat Competition Team made waves this past semester with their capstone design, the USS Illini.

This past April, the team competed in the 2025 Promoting Electric Propulsion (PEP) Competition hosted by the American Society of Naval Engineers (ASNE). The competition, which featured heats for crewed and uncrewed (i.e., remote controlled) boats, took place at First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach.

“The most exciting and rewarding part of this project was seeing the hard work of all 10 of our team members come to fruition in Virginia Beach,” said team member Drew Stadelman. “What piqued my interest about this project was that it provided an opportunity to be a part of a concept to completion project focused on an increasingly important idea—sustainable solutions for everyday things.”

Advised by Associate Professor Kelly Stephani, MechSE seniors Matthew Bianchi, Noah Brody, Carter Eid, Sebastian Sanchez, Allan Zhu, Ethan Cho, Xiaorui Gu, Hongbo Nie, Kevin Ho, and Stadelman were originally assigned to two boat teams (Orange and Blue).

“It was decided early on that it would be in our best interests to combine the teams and focus on a singular boat,” Stadelman said. The students organized themselves into five subteams: hull/waterproofing, high voltage, low voltage, propulsion, and cooling. The fully integrated boat prototype, which is approximately the size of a youth kayak, was tested at the CRCE indoor pool as well as Crystal Lake in Urbana.

The PEP competition is intended to foster the development of electric boats in the United States by promoting electric propulsion research in a fun, community-friendly way.

“[Our] team was the first of [MechSE’s] PEP electric boat teams to attend the competition with a functioning craft,” Stadelman said. “We were able to research, design, manufacture, iterate, and compete with [our] boat within a 10-week time frame.”

The team’s goal was to use commercially available electric material to create a low-cost, environmentally friendly uncrewed boat design. Their prototype included design features such as a kayak-style hull, dual 3D-printed propellers, and water-based cooling. Their brushless propulsion system featured four 10,000 mAh lithium polymer batteries.

“This team was extremely talented and highly motivated,” Stephani said. “During my very first meeting with this team, they said this is the year that we are going to get this boat in the water. They absolutely delivered.”

The competition required the USS Illini to carry a 30-pound removeable payload while completing a two-mile course in less than 55 minutes. The competition was run in time trials, with each boat staggered in its start to avoid course collisions. Although the USS Illini fell short of the 2-mile mark, stopping at 1.4 miles due to an electronic speed controller failure, the boat team had already demonstrated reliability in many subsystems and recorded valuable data that will help guide future iterations of the boat.

“We were able to verify many of our initial calculations and safety factors from our research and design phases,” Stadelman said of the experience. “Our qualification in Virginia Beach [also] secured $5,000 in competition funding from ASNE for the next team, which they will be able to use for both engineering and transportation.”

“Their growth as a team was phenomenal,” Stephani reflected of the project. “I was impressed, and this was a huge step forward for this activity. Their efforts will provide critical performance for future teams.”

The Electric Boat Team was sponsored by the Center for Power of Optimization of Electro-Thermal Systems (POETS) and MechSE alumnus Bill Profilet (BSME 1984).

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Kelly Stephani is a Kritzer Faculty Fellow and a Department Affiliate of the Center for Hypersonics & Entry Systems Studies (CHESS).