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All-electric Porsche at MIT
(Thursday, 15 May 2008) Written by greeniac13
MIT student ingenuity plus high-tech batteries yields advanced all-electric Porsche!!

With a click and a hum, the sleek Porsche 914 pulled away from the curb while a dozen onlookers watched anxiously and the passenger gazed down at a laptop plugged into the dashboard.

Why the drama? Once powered by a conventional gasoline engine, the 1976 Porsche now operates on 18 high-tech batteries—the result of work by a group of dedicated undergraduate and graduate MIT students and their mentors.

Converting the car to an advanced electric vehicle (EV) is an achievement in itself and serves to demonstrate the viability of the technology. But for the students, the real fun starts now. Said mechanical engineering graduate student Craig Wildman, "Now we get to take data while we're driving. We can record everything that happens on a laptop, come back and change parameters, and test drive it again." With the Porsche as a test platform, the students can monitor conditions in the car while looking for ways to increase efficiency, performance, and range and to bring down costs.

The Porsche was donated two years ago by Professor Yang Shao-Horn of mechanical engineering, who with her husband, Dr. Quinn Horn, a consulting engineer from Exponent, bought it on eBay and made it available to students interested in converting it to electric power. In addition to providing an unusual opportunity for hands-on learning, the project will ultimately yield information valuable to Shao-Horn's research on advanced batteries. Specifically, she and her colleagues in the MIT Electrochemical Energy Laboratory will be able to measure the conditions that batteries encounter inside an operating vehicle.

"In the laboratory we work on materials to make batteries safer, last longer, and have higher energy," she said. "But we are also interested in gaining a good perspective on the system. What's involved in building an electric vehicle, and what's required of the batteries?"

The student project took off when Valence Technology, Inc., agreed to donate 18 rechargeable batteries valued at $2030 each, plus a battery-management system. While electric vehicles have generally operated on conventional lead-acid batteries, Valence provided its enabling lithium phosphate rechargeable batteries, which are lighter, last longer, charge up faster, have a longer lifetime, and don't pose a safety risk.

Last year, Gerardo Jose la O', a graduate student in materials science and engineering, Emmanuel Sin '07, and others began the project by removing the original engine, exhaust lines, and fuel tank and installing an electric motor and motor controller, CONTINUE TO FULL ARTICLE

posted by Gina Forsyth
from MIT's Energy Initiative website: web.mit.edu/mitei/education/spotlights/electric-porsche.html
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