Jesse Davis and Dr. C. Greg Jensen, Mechanical Engineering
I have been involved with Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education (PACE) since January 2008. The goal of this organization involving industry sponsors and student teams is to teach and foster engineering collaboration in today’s global market. Various projects are undertaken in PACE, but the main focus is design and engineering in the automotive field. I participated in two projects during the past year.
1) Over the past 3 years, BYU led over twenty universities in engineering and building two iterations of a Formula 1 style race car. This project as an academic endeavor was completed at the end of 2009, but will continue to be a display piece for BYU’s Mechanical Engineering department.
2) I was also involved in a project that is new for the 2009 academic year, The Emerging Market Vehicle Project. PACE has undertaken the development of a concept car which is to be targeted at emerging markets or first time automobile buyers in developing nations. The team BYU has taken lead of the engine development segment of the project and is known as the Emerging Market Engine (EME) team.
From January to December of 2008, I was a member of the PACE Racecar team, and was a member of the EME team from January 2009 until present time (December 2009) and will continue participating in this project in the coming year.
Status of Race Car Project
During the 2009 academic year, BYU led universities around the world in designing and engineering the second iteration of a formula 1 style race car. During the summer of 2008 the car was manufactured and assembled at BYU. As a member of the PACE Race Car team I was responsible for building and tuning race car’s engine.
The engine as it stood at the end of July 2008 pictured in figure 1. In August 2008 I traveled with Dr. Jensen and the rest of the PACE Racecar team to Detroit to present the car to our PACE sponsors which included GM, Siemens, HP, EDS and Sun Microsystems, among many others. The car remained on display in Detroit until November 2008, at which point the car was returned to BYU. Upon its return I was able to start the engine for the first time and then prepare the car for shipping to Korea for the third year of the project which involved refining the design and making the car track-worthy. Figure 2 shows the car in Korea on a test track at GM Daewoo. The car is now returning to BYU where I will tune the engine. Following the tuning process, the car will spend the following year on display in Detrioit at GM, in Cincinatti at Belcan Engineering and at BYU.
Progress of Emerging Market Engine Project
In 2009 I joined the EME team as the engine controls specialist. The aim of the EME project is to find a high efficiency engine and modify it to achieve excellent fuel economy in an automotive application. 2008-2009 was the first year of the three year project. Vehicle specifications were provided by the Emerging Market Vehicle Project lead team at the University of Sao Paulo, and we set the goal to modify an engine to achieve 60 miles per gallon in the specified vehicle.
In the beginning of 2009, we obtained a small engine for experimentation from a BMW motorcycle and tested it to determine its performance and efficiency in unmodified form. Figure 3 contains a data table showing the engine’s Brake Specific Fuel Consumption, a measure of efficiency, under varying speeds and loads. Using this data, we determined that the engine would achieve 54 miles per gallon, and that the engine was slightly underpowered for this application. To gain efficiency we modified the engine to use a different engine management system and turbocharged the engine to gain the power needed to meet the vehicle’s specifications. At the present time, this stage of the project is still in progress.
The information gathered during the 2008-2009 school year was presented to our mentors and sponsors at GM Powertrain and Belcan Engineering in July 2009. We received valuable feedback on our methods and hypotheses. I learned that the motorcycle engine was a poor choice for an automotive application due to several factors explained to me by the engineers at GM. Despite this fact I am continuing the project to find what is possible with this engine.