Electric Sports Car Journey Down the Pan-American Highway Powered by LabVIEW and CompactRIO

[jboone]

When the Racing Green Endurance (RGE) team departed from Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay  in early July to begin their more than 16,000 mile journey on the Pan-American  Highway, they did so in an electric sports car powered, in part, by NI LabVIEW  and NI CompactRIO.

RGE is a student-led project at Imperial College London that aims to  demonstrate the potential of zero-emission cars. The team partnered with Radical  Sportscars to produce the SRZero electric sports car, which is based on the  chassis of the Radical SR8, a British supercar that, until recently, held the  Nürburgring lap record for the fastest production car in the world. The SRZero  uses a fully electric powertrain that can achieve a top speed of 120 mph. The  car has a unique twin-motor electric drive system that makes it possible for the  car to travel further than any other electric car before needing to be  recharged. Based on their collaboration with RGE, Radical Sportscars plans to  launch a production version of the vehicle in 2011.

LabVIEW and CompactRIO power the car’s control systems, making it possible  for RGE to integrate all the components in the power train. CompactRIO controls  the battery management system to monitor and protect the health of the Lithium  Iron Phosphate batteries. CompactRIO also manages motor controllers, driver  interfaces and the car’s safety systems.

"CompactRIO, powered by LabVIEW, is the brain of the car," said Alec de  Zegher, chief control engineer on the project. "The control system we have built  using NI tools enables us to tightly integrate and manage all the different  systems on the car."

Toby Schulz, the team’s energy and vehicle systems engineer, added, "We chose  CompactRIO to run the SRZero because of its powerful, robust and flexible  nature, important attributes when building an experimental electric vehicle.  With CompactRIO, our control systems can be adapted and expanded at ease. From  our experience with Formula Student, we knew using LabVIEW graphical programming  and CompactRIO reconfigurable hardware would enable us to rapidly design and  iteratively prototype advanced control systems for the car, allowing us to get  from initial concept to a full, road-legal deployment in just months."

RGE will drive the car from Alaska to the world’s southernmost city, Ushuaia,  Argentina, and if successful, will become the first electric car to travel the  entire Pan-American Highway. One of the team’s stops on their journey will be  Austin, Texas, during the first week of August for NIWeek 2010.

Visit the team’s website to learn more about  the car and the technology powering it and to follow their progress by blog and  via a live tracking map.