Electric Go-kart Research Articles

A Proposal for an Empirical Approach to the Re-creation of Vehicle Drive Cycles

AbstractVehicles such as buses, delivery trucks, mining equipment, and motorsport vehicles often repeat a highly defined pattern, route, or track during normal use. For these vehicles, standard dynamometer drive cycles are of little use. In this paper it is proposed that deriving a vehicle drive cycle from empirical data collected from on-board vehicle sensors would produce more accurate vehicle characteristic predictions for special purpose vehicles. This study answers the question “Is it possible to use recorded vehicle data to replicate a real world driving scenario for the purpose of vehicle diagnostics?” To reduce the complexity of the project, an electric go-kart is to be used as test vehicle.

Case-study of an Educational Engineering Project: a Series Hybrid Electric Kart

The students enrolled in the Energy Master's program at the K.U.Leuven are expected to study and develop a series hybrid electric go-kart during their first Master year. Their main goal is to develop control algorithms in Matlab/Simulink for the different power electronic modules present on the kart. This allows students to work in small sub-groups, each group focusing on their own specific problem. At the end of the project, the solutions found by the separate groups are combined, and integrated on the kart's single board computer which governs the power electronic modules. If they succeed, students can drive the kart around, while using the wireless link to gather and study real-time current, voltage and speed measurements of the kart in motion.