One of the most important student car design competitions has returned. EcoCAR 2: Plugging In to the Future features new schools, new cars and a whole new focus.
Unlike other student-built car projects, the three-year engineering and design challenge gives college teams an existing vehicle and tasks them with retrofitting it with an innovative and reliable hybrid drivetrain. The winning vehicle can’t be a kit car, either. Competition organizers are looking for production-ready powertrains and showroom-worthy designs.
During the competition’s first year, which just finished, students learned to maximize vehicle efficiency by testing powertrains and vehicle control systems using advanced modeling software — the same kind that car manufacturers use. Mississippi State’s team (shown above) won that round — their third first place finish in the nine years they’ve been competing. Now, the teams are taking delivery of their GM-donated 2013 Chevrolet Malibus and getting to work.
It’s a more space-intensive challenge than the last round of EcoCar, which ended in 2011 and gave students a fleet of relatively roomy Saturn Vue crossovers to stuff batteries and generators into. “The packaging challenge is much more significant for a sedan,” said Kristen De La Rosa, EcoCAR 2 program director at the Argonne National Laboratory.
Also smaller: the gains in fuel economy that the students will see. When EcoCAR first started, hybrids were the stuff of research projects. Now, they’re mainstream vehicle types, which makes software improvements almost as important as hardware ones.
“We have moved to a point in the competition where the teams have the tools available to them to be much more advanced,” said Brian Benoy, the Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition controls and simulation engineer at Argonne National Laboratory. “The distinguishing factor is the controls — the unique algorithms these students come up with. That’s what squeaks out that extra mile per gallon.”
In addition to vehicle controls, the students will be experimenting with E85, biodiesel and hydrogen along with five different kinds of plug-in hybrid vehicle architectures.”It used to be that we were on the edge of this type of technology,” said Patrick Davis, who directs the Department of Energy’s Vehicle Techologies Program. “Now we are there, and these students are attempting to take it even further.”
Nine of the teams will also be competing for a separate prize offered by Freescale. It requires students to create a vehicle infotainment system for a six inch touchscreen in the Malibu’s center stack that will control audio and climate functions and also show an energy flow diagram. It’s indicative of EcoCAR’s expansion from mechanical engineering into other fields.
“It’s an effort to expand on our software development side of the competition,” Benoy said. “We’ve had a lot of really good progress with it so far.” So far, students have created and tested their infotainment systems on a vehicle simulator, which should make installation in the Malibu seamless.
According to De La Rosa, the students participating in EcoCAR gain the kind of real-world skills that auto manufacturers demand. “About 75 percent of them end up in the auto industry,” she said. “That’s the main goal of our competition. They end up having not only the hands-on skills of developing these kinds of vehicles, but they understand all these engineering tradeoffs that the auto industry has to deal with.”
Courtesy of Wired
