The freedom that personal mobility provides is a building block of America's culture and strength. Over the last decade, the American automotive customer market has trended toward larger family-sized vehicles. At the same time, there has been an increased need to reduce energy consumption, as well as to decrease vehicle emissions. As a result, the automotive and electronic industries, the U.S. and Canadian governments, and the academic community have been working together, through a series of special competitive programs, to develop and explore advanced vehicle technologies that address important energy and environmental issues.
Since 1987, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has sponsored more than two dozen competitions challenging thousands of engineering students to achieve better fuel economy and lower emissions while maintaining the safety, performance, utility, and consumer appeal of a variety of vehicles. Now, General Motors (GM), DOE, and other government and industry leaders have developed a new competition called Challenge X: Crossover to Sustainable Mobility. This ground breaking three-year competition will give engineering schools an opportunity to participate in hands-on research and development with leading-edge automotive propulsion, fuels, materials, and emissions-control technologies.
Students are challenged to re-engineer a GM crossover vehicle to minimize energy consumption, emissions, and greenhouse gases while maintaining or exceeding consumer appeal, utility and performance of the stock vehicle. Year one will focus on modeling, simulation, and testing of the vehicle powertrain and vehicle subsystems selected by each school. The final two years will require teams to develop and integrate their advanced powertrain and subsystems into a donated GM crossover vehicle. At the conclusion of each competition year, the teams will come together to undergo extensive judging and evaluation.
Participating teams are provided with a variety of resources to help achieve their objectives, including substantial technical support and mentoring from GM and other sponsors. Each team will also receive $10,000 in seed money and will be eligible to receive additional production parts from GM and considerable software and hardware donations from other sponsors. Teams will also be expected to solicit additional in-kind and direct resources from outside sources as well. Using a development process modeled after GM Global Vehicle Development Process, teams will gain valuable experience in real-world engineering practices. The students will also develop a strong understanding of advanced vehicle technologies that will prepare them to become highly skilled engineers who will lead the automotive industry into the 21st century and enable North America to remain competitive in the global marketplace.
Challenge X at Ohio State is a student project affiliated with OSU Motorsports and the Center for Automotive Research (CAR). It is a four year competitive project against 17 other universities to convert a 2005 Chevrolet Equinox SUV into a hybrid electric vehicle; a more detailed overview is given here.
To gain an understanding of the magnitude of this project, consider that our design involves replacing the relatively large engine (a 3.4L gasoline V6) with a much smaller and a very different one (a Fiat 1.9L turbodiesel). And replacing the transmission. And belting an electric machine to the engine for engine start-stop and electricity generation. In the back, the rear axle will have a big motor powering it (a Ford or a GM, we haven't decided), for electric-only accelerations and regenerative braking.
Think for a moment about the intense aftertreatment involved to reach a Tier 2, Bin 5 emissions rating with a diesel engine. About the mounting and harnessing needed, and putting them in a very tight engine compartment or a tighter underbody. Interested?
Or maybe keyboards and code are more your thing than wrenches and grease. A lot of computer power goes into making a real car work. And all of that computer power needs to be programmed. Our systems integration team builds models in Simulink and compiles them to run on hardware like the Phytec and the MotoHawk controllers to interface with motors, engines, sensors, batteries, etc., across the same CAN data network. There are programmers of all skill levels on the team, and they are all very productive in Simulink's bare-bones graphical programming environment (which all you code monkeys will need to try before rejecting).
Furthermore, the dynamic control of hybrid electric vehicles is currently the topic of a number of Masters theses and doctoral dissertations in progress at CAR. The control strategy, the actual math that handles driver-requested torque split, fuel consumption minimization, and driveability, is under heavy research. If this is your cup of tea, you may wind up writing a thesis on it. (In fact, since CAR is an industry-funded research center, it wouldn't be remarkable for someone to get involved in a research student project like ours and do undergraduate or graduate research in conjunction with work on the team.)
The reason it's called a hybrid is because it has fuel and batteries. Our electrical team has highly experienced and skilled students to deal with the mountain of electronics, wiring, and high-voltage systems that need to be stuffed into the Equinox to make it do all the things we've promised it can do. Level-shift amplifier circuits for data acquisition, solid-state relays to direct power routes, ground fault detectors, and electromagnetic interference are daily projects.
But enough about fun. Everyone knows that, unlike the mid-90s, companies have many more choices in whom they hire, and they need to be more scrutinizing about their college recruits. Companies across the board don't place much emphasis on grades anymore—it's real-world experience that'll enable them to get the most value out of their new hires. Whether it's designing an H infinity controller for HEV torque split or tuning an exhaust aftertreatment system using cutting edge LNT and SCR technologies, or experience with industry-standard tools like MATLAB/Simulink, LabVIEW, SolidWorks, Unigraphics, the MPC processor family of processors, the PXI line of hardware, you need to know the things that'll take you the farthest in the real work environment.
And this goes to you business management, finance, and communications majors also. CAR is a very well-funded and well-known organization. So are all our competition sponsors. This presents a fabulous opportunity to hone your abilities at guiding the non-technical aspects of a varied and multidisciplinary team under this kind of limelight. You have the chance to be partially or wholly responsible for our outreach, public relations and awareness, and internal management efforts.
Whether you are a freshman wanting to learn more about yourself and your major, an upperclassman wanting to apply what they're teaching you in your six- and seven-hundred level classes, or a graduate student interested in really getting into a speciality: you'll not only find others like yourself already in Challenge X, but you'll also get what you want, and probably a lot more.
For a list of projects that are currently in progress, check the projects page. Feel free to contact anyone listed on the Roster or any of the team leaders for further information, or just to introduce yourself. Come by our meetings or weekend work days. (This summer, we have a number of students working full-time at CAR on Challenge X, so you're welcome to come by our team leader meetings, Wednesdays at 3pm.) You'll find it pretty easy to get very involved.
OSU Challenge X base of operations is the Center for Automotive Research, located near West Campus on Kinnear Road. It is a multi-disciplinary center for research and scholarhood in cutting edge fields of automotive and transportation engineering, including hybrid electric vehicles, fuel cells, supercapacitors, engine design, exhaust aftertreatment, etc.
A host of faculty with extensive connections in industry and governmental agencies advise undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. researchers who work in these varied fields. Student projects such as Challenge X present a unique opportunity to do scholarly research.
Address Center for Automotive Research 930 Kinnear Road Columbus, OH 43212 USA
Name: John Kruckenberg Email: Fields of study: Bachelors in Electrical Engineering Positions: Electronics and systems integration Activities and interests: Circuits, software controls, data acquisition, and exhaust after-treatment control systems, exhaust after-treatment programming, and exhaust after-treatment fault diagnosis.
Challenge X EXCLUSIVE: Ohio State University design team relies on Model-Based Design tools and determination in a four-year hybrid power train development effort
By Mike Arnett and the Ohio State University Challenge X team, July 13, 2007
Blogs 
