Electric Buckeye - electric vehicles development

Automotive Manufacturing & Production, July, 2001

Right now, many people equate electric vehicles [EVs] with the blistering speeds of golf carts. Some enterprising engineering students at the Ohio State University want to dispel that notion with what they hope will be the fastest EV on the planet.

The current EV land speed record is 245 mph [that's right: there's no decimal point missing). The "Buckeye Bullet" team hopes to best that by turning in a 300-mph performance.

However, when I visited the garage of OSU's Center for Automotive Research [CAR] I saw that the Bullet is pretty much a pile of cro-moly tubes in a basket. But next fall, it will be a carbon fiber-sheathed vehicle powered by a 400-plus hp three-phase induction motor and 900 volts of Sanyo nickel metal hydride batteries. The total mass: 3,500 lb.

Between now and the test track on the California desert, there will be a whole lot of computer-aided designing and engineering going on at CAR. The studies are using design software from SolidWorks [Concord, MA] to create aerodynamic surface drawings. HyperMesh from Altair Engineering [Troy, MI], a finite element tool, is then applied. Aerodynamic analysis is being performed at Honda R&D Americas [Raymond, OH) with flow modeling software from Fluent Inc. [Lebanon, NH).

The purpose of all this computer simulation is to minimize the amount of wind tunnel testing: they're hoping For just one test before the real thing.

KEW X