Innovative seniors design futuristic motorcycle

Ever wanted to build your very own motorcycle?

Alex Bell and Andres Pacheco, senior engineering students from Swarthmore College had the opportunity to do just that, thanks to funding by the college’s engineering department. Spurred by their interest in alternative energies and vehicle efficiency, they have been working on building from scratch a “proof of concept hydrogen fuel cell motorcycle,” for two years now.

“The goal of our project is to design and build a functional hydrogen fuel cell motorcycle and compare the efficiency data against battery and ICE motorcycles,” said Bell and Pacheco, in an article in Fuel Cell Today.

They have posted a rough draft of their “Fuel Cell Vehicle Engineering Report” on their website with their specific design decisions, vehicle components, and fuel cell vehicle efficiency comparisons.

According to the treehugger, “The fuel cell is made by Ballard. It is a Polymer Exchange Membrane (PEM) stack that can generate 1.2 kw (1.6HP) and the electric motor is a 1.2kw AC 6-pole induction motor built by CFR Italy (so they won’t be drag racing this thing).”

More relevant to you test engineers reading this, the two students used a microcontroller to record and display the data about “the energy produced by the fuel cell as well as the operation of the vehicle.” More specifically, they used an ATmega168 mounted on an arduino board, which reads serial values in RS-232 and RS-485 from the fuel cell and motor controller.

For signal conversion, they used two maxim chips, and for USB saving, they state that they used a Vindicum VDIP1 in UART mode. They state that they “chose this over a PIC unit because we wanted to operate without an ICD so that [they] could make corrections without having to remove the system and take it back to the lab (at Swarthmore compilers are only installed on lab computers). For visual output [they] used a simple 2 line 16 character LCD screen.”

CleanTechnica reports: “Bell and Pacheco estimate that the motorcycle has an average efficiency of 50%. After averaging in losses in propulsion, total vehicle efficiency is expected to be 46%.”

This number, which the two hope to increase to about 60% after further modifications and repairs, is very impressive, especially since, as you may know, traditional ICE engines only manage about half that.

While you won’t see any of these bikes rolling around your town in the near future, these young engineers certainly appear to have a great future ahead of them, and hope to present their final paper (upon approval) at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Fuel Cell Science, Engineering, and Technology conference in June.

Hopefully, their research will contribute to greater awareness and progress in green engineering, and also inspire further interest in this area for budding mechanical engineers, and to show this new generation that engineering can be simultaneously immensely practical and “cool.”

P.S. Speaking of green bikes, check out this article at treehugger which highlights the world’s fastest production electric motorcycle, with an incredible top speed of 150 mph.