Electric and hybrid vehicle engineers and designers are faced with the important issue of how to adequately configure required powertrain system components to achieve needed performance, occupant accommodation, and operational objectives. This course enables participants to fully comprehend vehicle architectural/configurational design requirements to enable efficient structural design, effective packaging of required components, and efficient vehicle performance for shared and autonomous operation. The importance of integrating these design requirements with specific vehicle user needs and expectations will be emphasized.
This course explores the design and performance of battery technologies used in today’s battery-electric vehicles. It focuses on the skills required to define a battery pack design, how battery packs are manufactured, and tests required before entering the market. Participants will leave the course equipped with tools to understand vehicle battery specifications and be able to extract the useful information from the large volume of electric vehicle content published daily. It also defines and analyzes fundamentals of battery operation and performance requirements for HEV, PHEV, EREV and full electric vehicle applications.
This course will introduce participants to the risks encountered in handling high voltage battery systems and their component parts. With the understanding of these risks, the course will then address how to raise risk awareness and then methods of dealing with those risks. The outcome of this course should be improved avoidance of personal injury, reduced risk of reputation loss, product liability actions and reduced risk of loss of property and time. Participants will have an opportunity to participate in a real world battery handling case study scenario in which they will identify solutions for potential risk situations.
This course provides an introduction to the concepts of hybrid vehicles, their missions and role of batteries to meet requirements. Battery topics including limitations, trends in hybrid development, customer wants and needs, battery system development timelines, comparison of electrochemistries and safety will be examined. Current offerings, cost factors, pack design considerations and testing will also be reviewed. Participants will perform a battery pack analysis exercise using a real world application.
Lunar tubes, natural underground structures on the Moon formed by ancient volcanic activity, offer natural protection from extreme temperatures, radiation, and micro-meteorite impacts, making them prime candidates for future lunar bases. However, the exploration of lunar tubes requires a high degree of mobility. Given the Moon's gravity, which is approximately six times weaker than Earth's, efficient navigation across rugged terrains within these lava tubes is achievable through jumping. In this work, we present the design of subsystems for a miniature hexapod rover weighing 1 kg, which can walk, jump, and stow. The walking system consists of two subsystems: one for in-plane walking, employing four single-degree-of-freedom (DOF) legs utilizing the KLANN walking mechanism, and another for directional adjustments before jumping. The latter employs a novel three-DOF mechanism employing a cable pulley mechanism to optimize space utilization.
Electric aircraft have emerged as a promising solution for sustainable aviation, aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and noise pollution. Efficiently estimating and optimizing energy consumption in these aircraft is crucial for enhancing their design, operation, and overall performance. This paper presents a novel framework for analyzing and modeling energy consumption patterns in lightweight electric aircraft. A mathematical model is developed, encompassing key factors such as aircraft weight, velocity, wing area, air density, coefficient of drag, and battery efficiency. This model estimates the total energy consumption during steady-level flight, considering the power requirements for propulsion, electrical systems, and auxiliary loads. The model serves as the foundation for analyzing energy consumption patterns and optimizing the performance of lightweight electric aircraft.
The purpose of the Air Generation System is to provide a constant supply of conditioned fresh air to meet the necessary oxygen availability and to prevent carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations for the occupants in an aircraft. The engine bleed energy or electrical load energy consumed towards this circumstance accounts to be approx. 5% of total fuel burn and in turn, contributes to the global emissions of greenhouse gases. This paper studies the improvement areas of the present conventional system such as fuel burn consumption associated with an aircraft environmental control system (ECS) depending on, the amount of bleed and ram air usage, electric power consumption. Improved systems for propulsion, power generation, sustainability, hybridization, and environmental control can be desirable for an aircraft.
Continuous improvements and innovations towards sustainability in the aviation industry has brought interest in electrified aviation. Electric aircrafts have short missions in which the temporal variability of thermal loads are high. Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries have emerged as prominent power source candidate for electric aircrafts and Urban Air Mobility (UAM). UAMs and Electric aircrafts have large battery packs with battery capacity ranging in hundreds or thousands of kWh. If the battery is exposed to temperatures outside the optimum range, the life and the performance of the battery reduces drastically. Hence, it is crucial to have a Thermal Management System (TMS) which would reduce the heat load on battery in addition to cabin, and machinery thermal loads. Thermal management can be done through active or passive cooling. Adding a passive cooling system like Phase Change Material (PCM) to the TMS reduces the design maximum thermal loads.
Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) envisions heterogenous airborne entities like crewed and uncrewed passenger and cargo vehicles within, and between urban and rural environment. To achieve this, a paradigm shift to a cooperative operating environment similar to Extensible Traffic Management (xTM) is needed. This requires the blending of Traditional Air Traffic Services (ATS) with the new generation AAM vehicles having their unique flight dynamics and handling characteristics. A hybrid environment needs to be established with enhanced shared situational awareness for all stakeholders, enabling equitable airspace access, minimizing risk, optimized airspace use, and providing flexible and adaptable airspace rules. This paper introduces a novel concept of distributed airspace management which would be apt for all kinds of operational scenarios perceived for AAM. The proposal is centered around the efficiency and safety in air space management being achieved by self-discipline.
There is a growing interest in the concept of a smart city and how these advanced technologies will improve the quality of living and make a city more attractive to visitors, commerce and industry. This course fills an unmet need for defining and explaining the relationship between connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and smart city transportation. It is apparent that CAVs will achieve the best results when integrated with current and emerging urban infrastructure for transportation. This course addresses such integration from technology, organizational, policy and business model perspectives.
There is been tremendous progress in the application of technology and artificial intelligence to connected and autonomous vehicles. At the same time, there have been considerable advances in data science and data analysis that allows large data sets to be managed for results. This course introduces big data and analytics, focusing on how these will be applied to data generated by autonomous and connected vehicles. These technologies will be explained within the context of a smart city.