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Where Battery Power Becomes Horsepower

The Electric Vehicle Club (EVC) is a Purdue University student organization that builds race cars, motorcycles, and other electric vehicles. Its flagship event is the evGrandPrix. Watch this video to see a pack of Li-ion batteries help push their karts upwards of 50mph in just seconds.

“The biggest difference between a combustion car and an electric car is the drivetrain,” said Matthew Kane  , president of EVC and a senior in electrical engineering. “All of your energy must be delivered from a battery to a motorized drivetrain. To do that, you need a massive battery pack.”

Topics:
Automotive Batteries Power

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 [Music]  Electric Vehicle Club is one of the many  motorsports organizations here at Purdue.   Our big thing that we do is go karts which you  race competitively in EV Grand Prix. The biggest   difference between a combustion kart and electric  kart is going to be your drivetrain. So all of   your energy must be delivered from a battery and  go to a motorized drivetrain. And so the biggest   difference you're going to see then obviously  is that you need a battery pack. Inside this   however many cubic feet, one or one and a half  cubic feet, you've got over 4.2 kilowatt hours   of energy just sitting here passively. That  comes with huge safety constraints. So there   are entire pages in the rulebook that are related  to, you know, battery management systems, proper   construction of the lithium batteries, technical  inspections for lithium batteries. Driving these  

    00:01:01 carts is an absolute blast. And that's another  one of the differences you'll see between the   combustion karts and EV karts is the torque that  you can give on one of these electric motors. You   put your pedal down and you've just got all the  torque right there immediately. The speed that   we reach in these is probably between 50, 55 miles  an hour. Driver skill is huge in races like this,   because if you can have a driver that can drive  efficiently, your electric efficiency is going   to mirror that because they're just using the  power better. Right now in Electric Vehicle   Club we actually have over 15 different majors  that are all part of our different projects. It's   very important to have a good set of people that  really know their way around mechanics, mechanical   engineering. The other also very important thing  to have on these carts is electrical engineering,   because we have a lot of high power electronics  here. Minimizing loss and making sure that you  

    00:01:45 are getting the most power transfer from your  battery to the wheels on the ground. There's so   many different car teams here that you can choose  from, and the big thing that drew me to EVC:   we're so focused on hands-on work and really just  immediately getting involved in projects. Our   karts are objectively a lot simpler than some  of the really fine-tuned internal combustion   vehicles or larger scale vehicles. And so even as  a freshman, you know, coming in with very little   engineering experience or motorsports knowledge at  all, you're able to immediately kind of get your   hands in on one of these. It was just so exciting  to be able to be a part of an organization that,   you know, valued people that were looking to get  hands-on experience immediately and not have to   wait, you know, semesters or even years to get  super involved in the technical side of projects.