Engineers' Need for Speed

	Engineer the race car electric with Matt Liberatore
	Make a methanol mini-racer with Tim Boire

Tufts Hybrid Racing Team Gears Up

Mechanical engineering major, Matt Liberatore, E09, got into engineering at the bookstore, but not because he thumbed through the required reading for freshman engineers. "I picked up a copy of this magazine called Grassroots Motor Sports. The cover said 'Go Racing,'" says Liberatore. "I thought, 'Wow, if I do engineering, I could do this.'" Since then, Liberatore has been racing along in his fellow engineers toward the ultimate goal of having a fully operational electric Formula 1-style race car.

Liberatore is the president of the Tufts Hybrid Racing club team that comprises 14 undergraduate and graduate engineers from electrical, mechanical, and computer engineering backgrounds. The team mission is to compete with an all-electric racer in the 2009 Formula Hybrid Competition hosted by Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. The competition challenge is to design, build, and compete an open-wheel, single-seat racecar, which emphasizes drive-train innovation and fuel efficiency.

The team initially coalesced around designing a car for the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) classic Formula competition, which doesn't emphasize hybrid design. In the fall of 2007, Liberatore took a course at Tufts Experimental College called "Intro to Race Car Design" co-taught by Joe Neal and Erica Belmont, a chemical engineering alumna and a current mechanical engineering graduate student, who would later become the team's manager. The course was intended to bring together students interested in racing and to get a team up to speed with the basics of building a race car. Rich Wlezien, professor and chair of the mechanical engineering department, later approached the burgeoning team and asked if they might think about shifting gears to enter the Formula Hybrid competition.

"We were hesitant at first to move away from the traditional internal combustion drive system because of its familiarity. We had to think long and hard about why we wanted to participate in Formula SAE in the first place,” says Belmont. “Once we realized that learning and challenging ourselves were most important to us, we knew Formula Hybrid was the way to go. The competition's two-year design cycle, with an all electric vehicle the first year moving to a full gas-electric hybrid the second, seemed like a good transition from our initial plans."

Since then, the team had the goal of competing in this year's Formula Hybrid race held at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Loudon, NH on May 5-8.

(left to right) Mechanical engineers Kate Siegel, Matt Liberatore, and Dana Monnier look over the frame of the Formula 1-style race car they are modifying to compete in the Formula Hybrid competition in 2009.

The team got off the ground with some seed money provided by Liberatore's parents and a $10,000 donation from Peter Wittich, E'83, who has supported alternative energy initiatives at the School of Engineering. The team also secured donations from the School of Engineering, Interstate Asphalt, and Alltrax which provided the electronics to program the engine's response.

However, getting all the pieces together has been tricky, says Liberatore. Just before the turn of the year, Liberatore and Belmont went to pick up the race-car chassis they had purchased from the University of New Hampshire. Throughout the winter, the team met for welding-safety and training meetings to strengthen the chassis in anticipation of the 200-pound motor which arrived mid-March. With the May deadline looming, the team pulled into the pit to reassess.

"I applaud their decision to delay competition until next spring," says Wlezien. "Good engineering is all about optimizing within constraints. The team properly paused, took a collective breath, and focused on the complexities of a hybrid system. That is a sign they are becoming solid engineers."

It's about the journey

Though this year's competition may have stalled out, the learning is motoring along. Rising senior Kate Seigel has been researching potential hybrid drive systems as part of an independent study project. Discussions in Bray Lab and on the team's Google groups site have been rampant, including ideas about the transmission, the electronic control system, and incorporation of off-the-shelf components.

Steve Daum, SAE Collegiate Programs Manager, says the Formula Hybrid competition is more about the process than the product for these students. "When you look at the formula hybrid student project, it's built by half a dozen or two dozen students over an 8- or 9-month period. You can't compare that with say, a production hybrid, from a major automobile company that involved thousands of engineers and possibly $100 million dollars to put it together and test," says Daum. "What they're building is less important than the fact that they're coming [to the competition] to learn how to improve their engineering skills and more importantly their engineering program management skills."

Joseph Helble, dean of Thayer School of Engineering, agreed that learning is paramount to the project and that the interdisciplinary opportunities make the competition unique. "That's how innovation happens, bringing in people from different perspectives to work toward a shared goal on a particular problem," Helble said during his introduction at the inaugural competition in 2007.

"Formula Hybrid requires that students of both mechanical and electrical engineering work closely together to produce a competitive vehicle," says Wynne Washburn, deputy director of the Formula Hybrid Project at the Thayer School of Engineering. "On many university campuses, these departments are physically—and psychologically—remote from one another."

Going for Green

Apart from side benefits of learning about project management and working with an interdisciplinary team, the project has gotten Liberatore interested in renewable energy. "The major crisis of my generation is what we're going to do about energy," he says. "Racing improves the breed—it's the drive of performance to squeeze the most out of the technology. So, if that technology could then be used elsewhere, that's something the Tufts team could contribute."

Dartmouth's Thayer School modeled the Formula Hybrid competition event after the Formula SAE® student competition. However, in the Formula Hybrid competition, fuel efficiency is a major factor.

"In the Formula SAE® competition students can use as much gas as they want," Doug Fraser, Research Engineer and Director of the Formula Hybrid Project, said in a statement. "In the Formula Hybrid competition, students need to consider fuel usage. If the students have gas left over at the end of the competition then they've wasted it. Ideally, they want to run out of gas right as they cross the finish line."

Washburn said that hybrid technologies resulting as a byproduct of the learning-aspect of the Formula Hybrid competition may be important as well. "We are looking forward to seeing what the student teams create in terms of novel hybrid architectures," says Washburn. "This will undoubtedly be beneficial to industry and the public [as] these new systems are developed."

Gentlemen, start your engines

When the Tufts team does enter next year, the competition will be stiffer. This year, 16 teams entered the competition--up from six teams in the competition's first year--including two international teams from Russia and Taiwan. Next year, Washburn says she predicts that the number of teams will double.

If the 2009 competition runs smoothly for the all-electric car, the Tufts Hybrid Racing Team will compete in 2010 with gas-electric technologies. And so far, lead engineer Belmont says the team is "on track to have the drive system running by the end of the school year and the car completed by the end of the calendar year." That will put the rising engineering underclassmen in pole position to transition their electric car to a true electric-gasoline hybrid.

—Julia C. Keller is Communications Specialist at Tufts School of Engineering
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The Making of a Methanol Mini-Racer

Alternative energy sources are imperative in a world where fossil fuels such as coal and oil are finite resources. In 2003, President George Bush touted hydrogen as the alternate energy of the future. "A simple chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen generates energy, which can be used to power a car producing only water, not exhaust fumes. With a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom," Bush said in his State of the Union Address.

Yet, even with Bush's $1.2 billion Hydrogen Fuel Initiative proposal, many technological obstacles still exist before hydrogen cars could become a reality. Currently, hydrogen is more expensive to produce than gasoline and it's difficult to store, especially inside cars which are conventionally designed to run on gasoline.

As part of a challenge presented by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) to stimulate interest and researching into alternative energy, students are encouraged to build a chemically powered model car. This year chemical and biological engineers Tim Boire, Andrew Sharp, and Stephen Crimlisk, worked together to create a chemical mini racer as part of their senior project.

"I have a huge passion for this type of project," says Sharp. "When I was younger, I played a lot with radio-controlled cars and autonomous robots; so this is a chemical engineering version of both of those."

The AIChE project requires that students create a chemically powered model car that can carry a certain weight (up to 500 ml of water) and travel a certain distance (between 50 and 100 feet) on a course laid out like a track and field event for javelin or a discus toss. Once the parameters for weight and distance are set, the teams must calibrate their chemical reactions so that the car stays within bounds and travels nearest to the finishing line without additional interference.

Tim Boire, Andrew Sharp, and Stephen Crimlisk test an early prototype of their mini methanol fueled racer that uses a proton exchange membrane to power the motor.

"You're supposed to have your car calibrated chemically to go that distance without any mechanical brakes or electrical timing devices. You can vary your flow rates, pressure, or concentration. We're looking to vary our volume," says Boire, who is also the vice president of the Tufts chapter of AIChE.

The Tufts AIChE team decided they would use methanol as their chemical of choice to fuel their mini racer. The model car runs well on the power of two AA batteries; but to use a chemical like methanol as the energy source, the team went with an off-the-shelf component fuel cell called a TekStak made by Parker Hannifin Corp.

The TekStak technology uses a proton exchange membrane (PEM) to use hydrogen ions stripped from methanol to power the car in what is called a direct-methanol fuel cell.

"The methanol delivers protons—hydrogen—across the membrane," says Boire. "It's a little easier than using hydrogen gas in terms of delivering to your system, especially if we have to do a lot of runs with it."

Sharp says that the Department of Defense is interested in the direct methanol-fuel cell technology because of its power and versatility. "The military likes them because their power to weight ratio is ten times better than a battery," says Sharp. "So instead of a soldier carrying around batteries for a laptop, GPS or a walkie-talkie, they use a methanol fuel-cell that's like a tenth that weight. That means more room for food or equipment."

"Convenience on race day is huge," Sharp says. "If we used a hydrogen fuel cell, we'd have to have pressure tanks and a constant supply of everything. We reduce the amount of variables going with methanol."

But when they attended the AIChE competition in April, Boire says he was surprised that of the four universities that competed, the three successful mini-racers used hydrogen as their primary fuel.

"We were thinking with hydrogen it'd be inconvenient to store. We might be able to get enough out of our methanol fuel cell, but if that doesn't work we know that hydrogen does," says Boire. The Tufts team also saw some neat add-ons including an optical switch that further refined the motion of the car. "One team had an iodine reaction, so when it changed colors there was an optical switch that would turn the motor off. That was something I never thought of," he says.

The team needed to work out some unforeseen mechanical and electrical engineering issues with the motor and gear ratio. But with the implementation of a motor in a gearbox, they were able to overcome this obstacle. The car is now able to run at 20 feet/min, Sharp says, adding that “simply adding a permanent belt drive instead of using a rubber band will increase the speed by around 75%.”

Though the chemical engineers will graduate this year without competing, they will pass on their methanol mini racer to the rising underclassman for the competition next year. “If our car can work, there’s not much they have to do for next year except for calibrating and optimizing it,” says Crimlisk.

"Starting from the ground up has been a little rough," says Sharp. Boire agrees, "Starting up the first year, it's hard to get a great product. There are problems that you don't anticipate that you have to figure out solutions for."

But on the whole, Boire says and he is optimistic about the project's future. "We'd like to turn this project into an annual event so that Tufts engineers are showing everybody across the country what we can do," he says.

—Julia C. Keller is Communications Specialist at Tufts School of Engineering