Page 5 - ME News Fall 2021

Energy Savers
two student groups housed in ME.
STUDENT GROUP: Minnesota Electric Racing Interview with President Andrew Hanson
“Our current team is comprised of a wide range of students across the university ranging from business to biology to engineering. We truly have a spot for everyone on our team, which makes our club so fun and exciting.
One of the biggest challenges with designing electric vehicles is a topic called battery mass ratio. Battery mass ratio is the idea that the
mass of the vehicle is directly related to current draw through the physics
of acceleration. The more mass, the more current that needs to be drawn from the batteries to propel the car. If you draw more current, then you need more capacity. The problem is that if you add more batteries to increase the capacity, you also increase mass. It turns into a never-ending cycle where the mass added offsets the capacity. The way to get around this is by doing two things: producing higher energy capacity batteries or producing more efficient motors. As a first-year team, we aren’t actively doing research to do either of those things, but we are actively applying the concepts to our car.
Our overall goal as a team is to produce well-educated students that can enter the automotive industry ready to help with the electric car revolution. Almost all automotive companies are currently building an electric cars, so it is a great time to being learning about the process and preparing for the future. In an ideal world, electric cars can be totally carbon neutral if the energy powering the car comes from a renewable world. That is a world I would like to one day live in.
Electric cars are beautifully simplistic, yet insanely complicated. It’s a
weird dynamic to think about because the drivetrain is essentially only 4 parts: battery, motor, inverter, controller. The tricky part is getting all those components to play nicely together. When done correctly, electric vehicles have a ton of performance upsides and the
capabilities of electric cars for consumer comforts
are very open because of the electronic systems
and the lack of exhaust.
My future goals are to get into the field of electric automotive design, so this club has opened a lot of doors to meet with people in the industry and get myself familiarized with the field.”
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