What is Formula Hybrid?
Formula Hybrid™ is a design and engineering challenge for undergraduate and graduate college and university students. They must design, build, and compete an open-wheel, single-seat, electric or plug-in hybrid-electric racecar. This car must conform to a formula which emphasizes drive train innovation and fuel efficiency in a high-performance application.
Formula Hybrid builds on the Formula SAE program and takes it to the next level. It adds a new layer of complexity and provides an additional technical challenge to student teams.
Formula Hybrid is recognized as the ultimate engineering challenge within the SAE Collegiate Design Series (CDS) Formula SAE competitions.
Purpose
- To give engineering students the opportunity to work across disciplinary boundaries while engineering and developing an electric or hybrid-electric race car.
- To encourage and promote the development of high-efficiency automotive drive trains.
Design Competition
The Formula Hybrid student automotive design competition is based on the highly successful Formula SAE program and encourages the development of alternative automotive drive trains with an emphasis on efficiency in a high-performance application.
Improved efficiency in an automotive drive system can be used to increase fuel economy, performance, or both. Fostering innovation in these areas can ultimately benefit society and the environment, even though the immediate goal is to improve performance.
Like Formula SAE events, the Formula Hybrid competition includes an acceleration test, autocross and endurance events, as well as engineering and construction static events. Unlike Formula SAE, Formula Hybrid events put a greater emphasis on drive train innovation and fuel efficiency.
Electric-Only Category
The 2012 Formula Hybrid competition will, for the first time, include vehicles built to a new category – Electric-only. This category is intended to allow vehicles designed without the on-board IC engine drive/charging systems required by Hybrids.
The electric only class provides teams an opportunity to delve into energy storage and release solutions, and allows teams with limited members or resources an avenue to entry into the Formula Hybrid competition.
Plug-in Hybrids
The primary emphasis of the Formula Hybrid Competition is on the engineering of the hybrid drive system and vehicle suspension to maximize performance in three different tests: acceleration, autocross, and endurance.
The most challenging event at the competition is the Endurance event. In Endurance, all the vehicles begin with fully-charged accumulators (Batteries or Capacitors). These may be charged from the grid, as is the norm for a plug-in hybrid vehicle. Hybrids will then be given an allocation of fuel such that all hybrid vehicles will start endurance with the same amount of energy on-board. (For 2012 this limit is 19.5 Mega Joules.)
Electric-only vehicles must complete endurance with the energy contained in their accumulators. There are limitations on accumulator capacity and cost. (For 2012 those limits are 5,400 Watt-Hours, and $7,200.)
Each team must then complete the 22-Kilometer Endurance event on that amount of energy, but must do it faster than any of the other teams. The presumption is that if a team finishes endurance with any energy remaining on-board, they have wasted that energy – they could have used it to go faster.
Engineering Challenges
Student teams designing and constructing a Formula Hybrid car can immerse themselves in any or all of the following disciplines:
- High-Power Electronics, including motors, generators, controllers, and DC-DC converters
- Mechanical systems including suspension, steering, braking, chassis design, body design, and ergonomics
- Race strategy and management
- Computerized systems control
- Data acquisition
- Internal combustion engines, including intake and exhaust systems, fuel management, camshaft profile design, and ignition systems
- Regenerative braking systems
- Project management
