EcoCAR sponsors help students
College students compete to redesign and rebuild a Saturn Vue to minimize fuel consumption and emissions.
Rick Nelson, Editor in Chief -- Test & Measurement World, 12/1/2009 2:00:00 AM
|
Last month, I commented on government efforts to support engineering education through STEM initiatives; this month, credit goes to private industry as well, which is supporting the DOE (Department of Energy) EcoCAR Challenge program, in which college students compete to redesign and rebuild a Saturn Vue to minimize fuel consumption and emissions.
Sponsors, including The MathWorks, National Instruments, Freescale Semiconductor, A123 Systems, and dSPACE, as well as GM, are helping students at 17 universities learn the latest techniques in electrical and mechanical design and simulation. The three-year program is now in its second year, with teams having conducted extensive design and simulation work during the first year while waiting for the arrival of the vehicles they plan to rebuild. At the end of year 2, the teams will have completed a “mule vehicle,” borrowing GM's term for a prototype that's 60 to 65% of the way to being production-ready.
Chad Conway, a sophomore double major in ME and EE, who serves as the electrical team leader for the Rose-Hulman EcoCAR team, says team members have been looking forward to year 2, when they begin taking wrenches to their vehicle, which arrived this fall. But Zac Chambers, associate professor of mechanical engineering and coadviser for the institute's EcoCAR program, says one thing participants can learn is patience: “A really big mistake that teams can make is that they immediately start tearing the vehicle apart. When they have an operational vehicle, it really behooves teams to use their CAN analysis tools to tap into the vehicle network to make sure they can communicate with all the different modules inside the vehicle and go out and collect some baseline data. They should get their testing procedures figured out while they have something that works before they try to figure out a testing procedure with something that may or may not work all that well.”
| See Rick Nelson's blog: "Taking the Measure" Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/Rick_editor |
During the first year, students conducted extensive model-based design (Ref. 1)—a technique heavily emphasized in the EcoCAR program, says Mike Wahlstrom, a control and simulation engineer at the Center for Transportation Research, Energy Systems Division, Argonne National Laboratory, which manages the EcoCAR program for the DOE. Says Wahlstrom, “This is a process that is really cutting edge in the auto industry right now. GM utilizes it, and that's why we thought it was really important to encourage it in EcoCAR.”
And training in model-based design isn't only available to EcoCAR participants. Chambers says that Rose-Hulman, with help from The MathWorks, Freescale, and MotoTron, has established the first-in-the-nation collegiate-level model-based design laboratory and offers a beginning course in model-based design and an advanced course that covers hardware-in-the-loop testing.
Concludes Wahlstrom, “This is 100% about the students…we are not out here to change the world with any one vehicle that we are going to build in the competition. The great thing is that we are building the engineers that will build those vehicles in the future.”
| REFERENCE |
|
No related content found.
- 0 rated items found.
Datasheets.com Electronic Parts & Inventory Search
185 million searchable parts
- Part Number
- Description
- Inventory
- Products
- Manufacturers
View All Webcasts
