In 2016, IEEE Spectrum featured Ohio State University’s Buckeye Current crew, a group of engineering majors who dared to test the prowess of an electric motorbike against the pros in the grueling Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. The 20-km “Race to the Clouds” took the scholars on a 156-turn staircase ascent, a route to a 4,300-m summit. Motorcycle Breaks Speed Records
By 2022, only two members of the team remained from the Pike’s Peak era. The group roster wasn’t the one change. That 12 months, the Buckeye Current group shifted its focus from conquering mountains to shattering land velocity data. In a joint effort with Venturi Group, which provides the sponsor for this group, college students started designing, prototyping and testing a previously built electrical motorbike, RW-5 Voxan.
In August, the Buckeye Current, an experimental car piloted by Venturi’s senior engineer, Louis-Marie Blondel, who heads the engineering team, set 4 new world speeds on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah by participating in the Bonneville Motorcycle Speed Trials. The trials have been conducted and controlled by Fédération Internationale de Motorcyclisme (FIM).
Rebuilding a Record-Setting Team Motorcycle Breaks Speed Records
School advisor is Dr. David Cooke, senior affiliate director, OSU’s Center for Automotive Research. He explains that the economically viable Pikes Peak cluster was disrupted as the novel coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic. “The timing was terrible,” he says. “The team had just wrapped up a whole sequence of races and was just looking to decide what it would do next. Then the pandemic hit, and the team shrank down to almost nothing.
“On our last day at Bonneville, I told the team, ‘You started a few weeks ago as a great student club, but you’re leaving as a racing team.’ —David Cookie, OSU’s Center for Automotive Research.
Cooke remembers that the remnant was two college students who have been engaged on associated aspect tasks, together with an electrical dust bike. They and Laura Friedmann, graduate pupil who not too long ago earned her grasp’s diploma in mechanical engineering, fashioned the nucleus of the revived Buckeye Current group. In only two years they have been able to recruit new student members, lay out the design and build of the RW-5 Voxan, and take on a lot of technical and task management knowledge and skills which they would have never been able to acquire within the classroom.
Cooke attributes the rapid rebound to the advantages of OSU’s deep well of institutional knowledge. “We have seven of these competition teams, with a total of about 300 students, that operate out of our facility, says Cooke. “All told, we’ve been participating in competitions such as Formula SAE and Baja SAE for 35 years, so there’s a lot of institutional knowledge there. [especially when the team is working with younger students coming in] there are always older students around who have valuable teaching skills to share, for example, machining, design, and how to organise themselves quickly for quick turnaround times on the track.
Record-Setting Performance Motorcycle Breaks Speed Records
The FIM assesses a motorbike’s velocity utilizing a straight path measuring 9 miles (14.5 kilometers) lengthy. At 2-mile (3.2-km) the motorbike, having already reached the peak of its velocity, has a laser beam target through which it shatters the laser beam and thus starts a timer. The second laser is located a distance of 1 mile or 1 km further along the route (depending on the real file being tested), after which the motorcycle breaks a second light beam, which stops the timer. Following the remainder of the way, there is the space for an operator to coast right down to a speed for which it would be safe to use the brake.
The FIM is based on a median velocity as factors into time to complete within a two-hour time window as concerns for the file associated with the FIM. Group president Sabina Williams, a fourth year student working towards a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, states that by the time of the Motorcycle Speed Trials, the group was able to complete the turnaround within 1 hour.
Cooke reports that the salt floor at Bonneville has about half the coefficient of friction of asphalt. Instead of zipping over grippy pavement on a perfect May afternoon,” he explains, “you’re zooming over a surface with slipping characteristics that are comparable to asphalt after light rain to snow to ice.
In order to properly appreciate the power of the motorcycle quadricycle, the Buckeye Current group’s motorbike in comparison with the iconic Vespa scooter. The least heavy of these scooters produces 18 kilowatts, which is equal to roughly 25hp in comparison to the 130 kW (174hp) that the RW-5 Voxan’s Beyond AXM2 axial flux motor provides. The power of the electrical bike is equal to that of Ducati Panigale V2 (200 kg, street bikes with running engine), a 100% gasoline-powered sport bike.
The winning combination of middleweight energy in a lightweight package from the Buckeye group enabled the RW-5 Voxan to establish new all-time velocity records for 4 categories:.
271.323 km/h (168.59 mph) over one mile.
Fastest common velocity with no fairing: 271.515 km/h (168.71 mph) over one kilometer.
Fastest common velocity with a fairing: 289.74 km/h (180.035 mph) over one mile.
Fastest common velocity with a fairing: 289.79 km/h (180.065 mph) over one kilometer.
These data are nonetheless pending validation by FIM.
New Challenges for Buckeye Current
Though there was no mountain to climb this time round, the Ohio State group nonetheless confronted challenges. However, during load conditioning in Utah, Williams reports that racing the bike at or very near maximum energy induced the motor in it to wear out. The team modified it with a spare motor that they happened to have in stock. After working late into the night time calibrating the brand new motor, they have been capable of full the ultimate two of the 4 days of timed sprints, throughout which the bike was pushed to its limits. It was a pretty daunting challenge I was happy to see the team conquer, says Williams.
There, Williams notes that a common topic across electrical motor bicycle groups was the battle with battery temperatures. The Buckeye Current group had issue protecting its machine’s 567-volt lithium-ion battery pack cool within the warmth of the salt flats. Williams states that another group also experienced the problem of protecting its battery heat enough to race in the mornings in low temperature conditions. And the entire groups confronted a relentless struggle to maintain the salt from corroding their bikes’ steel components.
Following the 200-mph (322-km/h) deceleration over the next 12 months.