MathWorks Makes Designing a Car Easy!

Team Captain, Gurhari Singh working on laptop in UWAFT's garage

(Photo taken by Josh Lo, Controls Team Co-Lead)

Designing a vehicle can be a very difficult task. Just ask General Motors (GM) where they employ thousands of highly-skilled engineers who design each and every aspect of the vehicle that you drive. Now, image designing a vehicle with less than a hundred university students. This is the challenge that the University of Waterloo Alternative Fuels Team (UWAFT) had to face when researching and designing its EcoCAR 2 vehicle. Luckily for UWAFT, much of the preliminary design work was already done by GM - leaving UWAFT responsible for redesigning the powertrain.

Redesigning the powertrain is still a challenging task and given many students have never worked on a vehicle before, tools were needed to help make the task easier. That is where the MathWorks’ MATLAB came into use. MathWorks donated their powerful MATLAB, Simulink and Stateflow software to UWAFT. This software, along with Argonne National Laboratory’s Autonomie allowed UWAFT team members to virtually build and test various powertrains. The tests conducted on these software models included acceleration of the vehicle, fuel consumption estimations, thermal analysis and much more. These models could also be pushed to their maximum limit and be ‘broken’ in the software world. This is much more cost-effective and safer than breaking physical prototypes. The resulting powertrain that was selected was a Series Plug-In Hybrid with two electric traction motors.

The beauty of MATLAB and Simulink actually comes after the architecture selection stage. Simulink, which is a graphical block diagramming tool, can also be used to program the vehicle controllers. This means that students do not need to learn another programming language and can easily transfer models developed in the powertrain selection stage, to the controller development stage, thus saving time and money. MATLAB can also be used to analyze large amounts of data by using automated scripts. These scripts can quickly analyze hundreds of hours worth of drive cycles and allow for students to quickly quantify the performance of the vehicle. From saving time and money during the modeling selection phase, to quickly analyzing experimental data, MathWorks’ tools made UWAFT's job much easier!

Engineering Explorations at University of Waterloo

On the evening of March 12th, 2012, the University of Waterloo opened its doors to local elementary school students for the Faculty of Engineering's annual Engineering Explorations night. Thousands of grade 6-8 students and their parents descended upon Waterloo Engineering to experience the faculty by viewing a mix of displays in a tour of the various departments. The three main objectives of Explorations are to excite students about engineering and technology in hopes of sparking an interest in continuing their math and science studies throughout high school, to provide the public with an opportunity to see what engineers do at the University of Waterloo, and to promote the Faculty of Engineering.

The University of Waterloo Alternative Fuels Team (UWAFT) had a booth set up and engaged in interactive presentations to groups of students and their parents about UWAFT, EcoCAR 2, and advanced vehicle technologies. "The students asked many questions about UWAFT, EcoCAR 2 and even alternative fuels, so we knew they were well engaged during these discussions" said Rachael Morin, Director of Youth Outreach. This exemplified their interest in UWAFT's project goals such as reducing fuel consumption, tailpipe emissions and well-to-wheel greenhouse gas emissions. According to Mark Goody, Director of Outreach "many students were actually very knowledgeable about the problems that exist from society's dependence on fossil fuels, the environmental risks associated with their extraction, and the environmental damage caused by their emissions."

UWAFT was very happy to give young students and their parents an opportunity to learn more about advanced vehicle technologies and the EcoCAR 2 program. Getting students interested in engineering and science is important as it ensures that there will be a next generation of passionate students, dedicated towards solving real-world problems that society is currently facing.