EVGP@PURDUEHELLYEAH!

And for those of you who didn't understand the title...
Electric Vehicle Grand Prix @ Purdue!

This past summer, President Obama awarded Purdue a (Sticks pinky finger to mouth) 6.2 Million Dollar grant to develop electric vehicle courses and degrees. Apparently, developing the degree programs is a big collaboration between the powers at colleges across the state, including IU, Purdue, Ivy Tech, Notre Dame, Purdue Calumet, and IUN. Some of the new "stuff" emerging from this: "Certificate and associate degree programs for vehicle technicians, bachelor's and master's degree programs for electric vehicle design and manufacturing engineers, and a certificate program in electric vehicle safety for emergency responders. It also will develop an outreach program to secondary schools and a Web site to provide information on electric vehicles to the general public."

The most exciting and relevant thing to come out of this (in my eyes anyway) is an electric vehicle race similar to Purdue's annual Grand Prix kart race!!!

Grand Prix is an annual race that is unique to Purdue, where teams throw a lawn mower engine on a go kart and design everything from the ground up. Then, they strap on their helmet and get it on! The winners get thrown in the record books, and get some awesome scholarship awards. I believe the Grand Prix race is about 141 laps on the track, and ends up being about 60 miles total! It also happens to be one of the biggest party weekends at Purdue, but that is besides the point...


Currently, I am an officer in the Association of Electrical Technologists. It's a club on campus that we try to set up events with people from industry to come and present for the club, and we do some activities like factory tours, and we did some stuff like a cookout and mingle session for freshman to meet each other and their professors before classes start in the fall.

Anyway, last Wednesday one of my professors on campus emailed the AET advisor about how he is assisting in teaching this new graduate course about electric vehicles, and it didn't dawn on him to try to get AET involved in the fun. The graduate course they are learning about electric vehicles, and are designing their own electric go karts for a EV Grand Prix race on April 18th. Professor Richardson explained that because the race is so fast approaching, that he would do anything he can to help us get up and running.

The Grand Prix race on campus is a huge annual event, and has been since 1958. The organizers of the very first EV Grand Prix event want to rival the media attention and scale of the Grand Prix. In order to do this, they need lots of participants! As of right now, they have around 10 teams constructing cars, but some of them may not complete their build in time for the race in 6 weeks. The goal of the EVGP organizers is to have around 16 teams competing in the race. Once the EVGP is recognized as a legitimate event and great tool to enthuse students about the future of electric vehicle technology, industry interest would be stimulated and the student-industry-university bond would be strengthened.

As of Thursday, Professor Richardson was 99.99% sure he would be able to get us a go kart chassis, and 95% of EVERYTHING we need to get our go kart running and the equipment required for us to race! He even offered to meet with us and bust his knuckles with us assembling it. He is even providing links to suggested parts that most of the students in the EV grad course are using so we don't even have to research that extensively where to find stuff on our own. Cool!!!

Basically, the students in the EV graduate course are learning the design process, and about acceleration / top speed gear ratios, battery technology, motor controls, motor specifications and how they all relate to each other. Professor Richardson is going to take all of the "middle of the road" specs they design and throw them on our go kart. Then, it is the responsibility of AET club to tweak and optimize our go kart for battery life, gear ratio, wheel base width, and anything else we want to try to throw in to our design last minute.

The race flow from my understanding is going to be 80-100 laps around the new Grand Prix track, which is about .4 miles long. Half way through the race, all of the racers will take a 15 minute pit stop break, and will be able to switch out their batteries and the second half of the race will continue in the exact same order the racers were in before the break. One of the things to consider is how much juice is being drained from the batteries during the first 40-50 laps of the race. If we were to run our motor at full speed, we would most likely be at the head of the pack, but then the batteries run the risk of dying and then we would drop back and most likely be DQ from the race. The opposite extreme is if we only run our controller at half capacity, we could have 1/4 of our battery life left at the half way point of the race at the battery swap out. Then, we are not using our battery capacity efficiently.

One of the big factors that influence how well we are going to do is kart/rider weight. The minimum weight is 350 lb. and maximum is 600 lb. The less weight added to the kart in dead mass that has to be carried around, more weight can then be contributed to the kart as components. Well, the club president and myself both weigh about 140-145 lb. so the odds of me being chosen as the driver are pretty good! How freakin cool would it be to get to go through the driver training and actually be the driver in the kart race!

If you couldn't tell, I'm really pumped about this! Myself and a few of my friends in my major get the opportunity to participate in the very first EVGP race at Purdue. We also get to play with a really cool toy and also get to put some of the things we learned about in our 3 years of schooling into practice in a very fun way. Who knows, maybe we'll even get lucky and win some scholarship $$$. Hell Yeah!

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