In 2016, IEEE Spectrum spotlighted Ohio State University’s Buckeye Current group, a bunch of engineering college students who dared to check their electrical motorbike’s mettle in opposition to professionals within the grueling Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. The 20-kilometer “Race to the Clouds” challenged the scholars with 156 hairpin activates a trek to the 4,300-meter summit.
By 2022, solely two members of the group have been holdovers from the Pike’s Peak days. The group roster wasn’t the one change. That 12 months, the Buckeye Current group shifted its focus from conquering mountains to shattering land velocity data. In a collaboration with the group’s sponsor, Monaco-based Venturi Group, college students began constructing and testing a completely new electrical motorbike, the RW-5 Voxan.
In August, the Buckeye Current group and the RW-5 Voxan, piloted by Venturi’s head of engineering, Louis-Marie Blondel, set 4 new world velocity data on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah through the Bonneville Motorcycle Speed Trials. The trials have been overseen by the Fédération Internationale de Motorcyclisme (FIM).
Rebuilding a Record-Setting Team
David Cooke, the senior affiliate director at OSU’s Center for Automotive Research, is the group’s school advisor. He says the profitable Pikes Peak group was scattered by the COVID-19 pandemic. “The timing was terrible,” he says. “The team had just wrapped up a whole sequence of races and was just looking to decide what it would do next. Then the pandemic hit, and the team shrank down to almost nothing.”
“On our last day at Bonneville, I told the team, ‘You started a few weeks ago as a great student club, but you’re leaving as a racing team.’” —David Cookie, OSU’s Center for Automotive Research
Cooke remembers that the remnant was two college students who have been engaged on associated aspect tasks, together with an electrical dust bike. They and Laura Friedmann, graduate pupil who not too long ago earned her grasp’s diploma in mechanical engineering, fashioned the nucleus of the revived Buckeye Current group. In simply two years, they have been capable of recruit new group members, design and construct the RW-5 Voxan, and choose up a bunch of technical and undertaking administration expertise and expertise that they’d by no means have gained contained in the classroom.
Cooke credit the fast bounce-back to OSU’s wealthy institutional information. “We have seven of these competition teams, with a total of about 300 students, that operate out of our facility,” says Cooke. “All told, we’ve been participating in competitions such as Formula SAE and Baja SAE for 35 years, so there’s a lot of institutional knowledge there. Even when the team has younger students coming in, there’s always some senior people around who know how to teach important skills such as machining, design, and how to organize themselves for quick turnarounds on the track.”
Record-Setting Performance
The FIM assesses a motorbike’s velocity utilizing a straight path measuring 9 miles (14.5 kilometers) lengthy. At the 2-mile (3.2-kilometer) mark, after the motorbike has reached its high velocity, it breaks a laser beam that begins a timer. A second laser, both 1 mile or 1 kilometer farther on the route (relying on the actual file being tried), the motorbike interrupts a second laser beam that stops the timer. The remainder of the route offers room for the driving force to coast right down to a velocity at which it’s secure to use the brakes.
The FIM makes use of a median velocity throughout two runs tried inside a two-hour window in its file concerns. Buckeye Current group president Sabina Williams, a fourth-year pupil pursuing a bachelor’s diploma in mechanical engineering, says that by the point the Motorcycle Speed Trials started, the group was capable of accomplish the turnaround inside one hour.
The Buckeye Current group entered the 148-kilogram RW-5 Voxan within the velocity trials’ electrical motorbike class for machines weighing between 100 and 150 kilograms. (There’s additionally a class for machines between 150 and 300 kg, and an “unlimited” class for something past 300 kg.) Williams says the group added specifically machined steel items to deliver the RW-5 Voxan’s weight proper as much as the 150 kg restrict. The added weight, the group figured, can be balanced out by enhancing the motorbike’s traction on the salt flats’ slippery floor: Cooke says that the salt floor at Bonneville has about half the coefficient of friction of asphalt. “So instead of driving on grippy asphalt on a beautiful Sunday,” he says, “you’re driving on a surface whose traction approximates asphalt after anything from a light rain to snow and ice.”
To put the Buckeye Current group’s motorbike in perspective, contemplate the long-lasting Vespa scooter. The peppiest of these light-weight scooters put out 18 kilowatts, or simply shy of 25 horsepower, in contrast with the 130 kW (174 hp) the RW-5 Voxan’s Beyond AXM2 axial flux motor delivers. The electrical bike’s energy output is corresponding to that of Ducati’s Panigale V2, a gasoline-powered, street-legal sport bike that weighs in at 200 kg.
The Buckeye group’s profitable pairing of middleweight energy in a light-weight package deal allowed the RW-5 Voxan to set new all-time velocity data in 4 classes:
- Fastest common velocity with no fairing (an aerodynamic cowl designed to scale back turbulence): 271.323 km/h (168.59 mph) over one mile.
- Fastest common velocity with no fairing: 271.515 km/h (168.71 mph) over one kilometer.
- Fastest common velocity with a fairing: 289.74 km/h (180.035 mph) over one mile.
- Fastest common velocity with a fairing: 289.79 km/h (180.065 mph) over one kilometer.
These data are nonetheless pending validation by FIM.
New Challenges for Buckeye Current
Though there was no mountain to climb this time round, the Ohio State group nonetheless confronted challenges. While prepping in Utah, Williams says that racing the bike at or close to peak energy triggered its motor to burn out. The group changed it with a spare motor they occurred to have readily available. After working late into the night time calibrating the brand new motor, they have been capable of full the ultimate two of the 4 days of timed sprints, throughout which the bike was pushed to its limits. “That was a significant challenge I was proud to see the team overcome,” says Williams.
A typical theme amongst electrical motorbike groups there, Williams says, was scuffling with battery temperatures. The Buckeye Current group had issue protecting its machine’s 567-volt lithium-ion battery pack cool within the warmth of the salt flats. Williams notes that one other group had issues protecting its battery heat sufficient to race within the mornings when temperatures have been low. And the entire groups confronted a relentless struggle to maintain the salt from corroding their bikes’ steel components.
The world file achievements not solely spotlight the continued success of the Buckeye Current group but in addition underscore the potential of electrical bikes to set new benchmarks in velocity and efficiency. “What we had on this team were a lot of really bright aspiring engineers,” says Cooke. “But we didn’t have a single person who had experience with race cars or on a racing team. On our last day at Bonneville, I told the team, ‘You started a few weeks ago as a great student club, but you’re leaving as a racing team.’” Williams says the newly minted race group now has its sights set on a brand new objective: Eclipsing the 200 mile-per-hour (322-kilometer-per-hour) mark throughout the subsequent 12 months.
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