214HP e-motorcycle built from scratch!

The Université de Sherbrooke is working on an electric motorcycle
A team of students from the engineering faculty have set the goal to design an all electric sports bike for 2014. The vehicle is going to be entirely designed by the student during their degree final project.

A multi-disciplinary project.
EMUS (Electric Motorcycle Université de Sherbrooke) is composed of 12 machanical engineering students for now, but they are looking to add as much electrical and computer engineers to the team. The project was officially launched in december, following the efforts of the previous sudent group of the same name, launched in 2010.

A two years journey.
The engineering program at Université de Sherbrooke teaches the principle of simultaneous engineering with major design projects. Third year students get to choose their own design project, that will take most of their time for the next two years. The process is closely followed by university professors, whom help the future engineers bring the project from a vague idea to a running prototype. Every year, a dozen projects take place. Sherbrooke's engineering faculty has seen projects like: Phoebus and Vue, two electric car conversions; Épervier, an acrobatic airplane designed from scratch; Pégase, a human powered plane; and many more. Through the years, teams have always managed to gather funds, ranging from 10 000$ to 100 000$; thanks to the generosity of the sponsors. Prototypes are unveiled at the "macagenial" show, that happens a few weeks before graduation, a show that celebrates a two years effort. EMUS' superbike will be unveiled in december 2014.

Aiming for an international championship
EMUS has set its goal to participate at TTXGP (www.egrandprix.com) in the summer of 2015. Teams from all around the world attend this competition with their all electric motorcycles, putting them to test against each other. The Université de Sherbrooke would become the first french canadian school to race at TTXGP.

Performances like Ducati or BMW
Speaking of performances, the team beleives that they can acheive and better performances than a regular combustion engine motorcycle. The elctric power train has instant and continuous torque, which translates to explosive accelerations and no need for a transmission. The team has set an objective of 300km/h for top speed limit, and a 45km range, enough to finish a TTXGP race. Some people may reget the sound of the combustion engine, which will be replaced by the smooth whisper of the electric motor, but will forget that detail once they see the outstanding performances and manuverability of the vehicle.

A 75 00$ Budget
The project is will cost 75 000$, entirely sponsor funded. If you would like to help fund the project, please communicate with us at teamemus@gmail.com. We issue tax return receips for all donations.

You can follow us on www.facebook.com/projetemus.
Visit our website: emus.ca

Welcome here Team EMUS :wink:

Doc

Hey everyone on the endless-sphere forum!
We are team EMUS (Electric Motorcycle of Universite de Sherbrooke), a team of mechanical, electrical and computer engineering students from Sherbrooke, Quebec in Canada!

Website: http://www.emus.ca
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Projetemus

As the title suggests, this article will be an overview of the build process of our all-electric motorbike to compete at the eMotoRacing Varsity Challenge this summer (July 11-12, 2015). To start this post on a good note, here are some mouth-watering pics of the bike as it sits right now!

[/URL

[URL=http://s1383.photobucket.com/user/teamEMUS/media/1271891_888100494535048_6064986083469683278_o_zpsyuvlf5re.jpg.html]






Before getting into technical details, here are the major rules we had to consider while designing the prototype:
- Zero emission vehicle (indeed)
- Battery pack voltage below 680 volts
- Max. 35” overall width and 100” overall length
- Max. weight of 220 Kg.
- High voltage wiring adequately insulated and crash resistant
For a more exhaustive listing, see the competition’s rules page here: http://emotoracing.com/rules
The bike was first intended to race at FIM eRoadRacing, but it hasn’t announced any event for 2015 yet. However, eMotoRacing Varsity challenge is perfect fit for our team.

Since we wanted to have a significant chance to win the eMotoRacing Varsity challenge, we decided to start from scratch as most successful electric vehicle manufacturers did (Tesla, Brammo, BMW, etc). It goes without saying that this approach gives us many advantages in comparison to simply converting an existing vehicle. It allows us to:

- Design a bigger battery compartment
- Position the motor and powertrain as we need
- Use the lightest materials available for chassis and body panels
- Use the structural strength of the battery pack as part of the chassis
- Have more control on the fitment of every part
- Achieve a good weight balancing of the bike

On the downside, this is a far more expensive way of designing an electric vehicle and also more mechanically complex. To facilitate the design and to provide the driver a familiar driving experience, we used about the same dimensions as a 600cc racing bike. After many iterations on both electrical and mechanical systems, the project is now almost in its final form, but still far from ready for the eMotoRacing Varsity Challenge! The following section will briefly cover different technical aspects of our prototype. Don’t hesitate to ask any questions, we will try our best to answer!

General specs:
- Peak power: 160 KW / 214 HP
- Continuous power: 90 KW / 120 HP
- Continuous torque: 190 Nm / 140 ft-lb
- Peak torque: 450 Nm / 330 ft-lb
- Batteries: Li-Po, 12 KWh
- Wheelbase: 1420 mm
- Weight: 220 Kg / 485 lbs

Chassis



As mentioned earlier, designing the vehicle from a blank sheet of paper allowed us to take advantage of the battery by using it as the central part of the chassis. The Lipo pack is housed inside a full aluminum monocoque chassis.The swing arm, front fork, motor and basically every major component connects directly to the chassis. Using a monocoque chassis provides the vehicle better stiffness, protects the batteries and allows the use of a large rectangular battery pack. However, accessing or removing the batteries can be arduous.







Brakes

As most sport bikes, our motorcycle uses double hydraulic disc brakes on the front wheel and single disc on the rear wheel. Regenerative braking is also possible with our motor-controller combo.The amount and smoothness of regen braking can be programmed and adjusted via the clutch lever to suit the needs of the driver.

Battery pack



The 12KWh 600 volts battery can put out 1000 amps peak current and is designed for a 45 kilometers racing range. The pack consists of three 600 volts main modules mounted side-by-side inside thechassis, slightly spaced apart with air ducts integrated in the aluminum panels to provide natural air cooling to the battery.These modules contain three 200v smaller modules connected in series, with their own BMS. A main BMS board processes the raw data sent by the 9 individual BMS then sends necessary information to the ECU. Each 200 volts module is made of Turnigy A-SPEC RC Lipo battery packs.
This type of batteries offers great power density (7.5 KW/Kg), strong charge and discharge current (65C discharge, 8C charge) and convenient packaging.



These cells were chosen amongst hundreds to fit our specific needs. The form factor, the weight, the specific energy, specific power and voltage were the main parameters we looked at. The fact that it also come prepackaged with bullet connectors was a great advantage regarding the assembly process and packaging.However these cells come at a very high price of about 60$ per unit. Considering the battery pack houses 243 of these, it brings the price of the battery pack to 15 000$, cells alone.

The main BMS controller and BMS modules are designed specifically for this application by our electrical team.





Motor and drive

Since the motor would be used in a racing motorcycle, it needed to meet particular requirements like high power density, shallow form, high speed and high efficiency. We used the Emrax 268 motor by ENSTROJ for the following reasons:

- High power in a small package (200 peak HP, 20.3Kg)
- 5000 RPM peak RPM
- High torque
- Liquid cooling capability
- 93-98% maximum efficiency
The motor you see on the picture is the Emrax 228 which we used for testing purposes. We will place an order for the Emrax 268 in the coming weeks.



The Emrax motor is synchronous 3-phase AC axial flux motor, with the highest power to weight ratio in the world. Like all permanent magnet AC motors (PMAC) it can be used as a motor or a generator (for regenerative braking).A broad market investigation was lead to search for all commercially available products. Motors like TM4, Yasa, Agni, Remy or UQM were considered. Because of its small size, power to weight ratio and assembly method, it was determined that it was the beast suited for the concept. This outrunner motor is both aircooled and water cooled.

We adopted the PM150 motor controller by Rinehart Motion Systems to exploit the full power this motor makes. It features great power density due to its packaging and water cooling system. This motor drive has an incredibly customizable motor control software that permits current timing and control in the three phases to fine-tune the power response and efficiency of the motor. It also features standard CAN bus and RS-232 interfaces for control and debugging.
To give you an idea of how good this controller is, it is used in some Brammo electric motorcycles!



We also looked at other drives like SEVCON, Bamocar, Unitek,Piktronik,TM4 but the RMS was the only one that could fit underneath the motorcycle without being too wide. It offers other advantages like being watercooled and allowing regen braking.
RMS are very supportive and offer great sutumer support. The drive is easy to program and understand.



Electrical system



Like most modern vehicles, data exchange between every electronic module is done via CAN busses. It connects our ECU with the main BMS unit, the motor controller, the front and back sensor data acquisition units and the front Kantrak 3700 display.



Like our BMS, the ECU is custom made for this vehicle. Both are based on the same STM32F105 automotive grade 32 bits ARM microcontrollers.

The end
Thank you for your interest in our project, we hope you liked this short overview of the EMUS motorcycle! Again if you have any questions, just post them in the comments and we’ll do our best to respond!

PS: For “montrealers” reading this (if any!), project EMUS will have a booth at the 2015 Motorcycle Show in Montreal

this week-end (feb. 27-28 and march 1st)!

Looks pretty awesome guys.

I just have a stupid question for you about batteries. I am trying to learn everything
I can to do a project similar to yours but a dirt bike. When Hobbyking says density 7.5 KW/Kg what does that mean?

When I do the the math I get 141 watt hours per Kg. What are they saying?

Looking good! That is an awesome motor made for flight. Love the strutural battery case.

motomoto said:

Looks pretty awesome guys.

I just have a stupid question for you about batteries. I am trying to learn everything
I can to do a project similar to yours but a dirt bike. When Hobbyking says density 7.5 KW/Kg what does that mean?

When I do the the math I get 141 watt hours per Kg. What are they saying?

Click to expand...

Specific energy and specific power are two different things. The hobby cells have a relatively lower specific energy but a very high specific power, just what you need for a very high power motorcycle with a relatively small air cooled pack.

Hey guys!.. glad to see you here! :wink:

that's just the perfect place to discuss about these kind of projects.

There is the most advanced and experience guys about small EV here!!

nice photo too!

Nice to see the battery :wink: I hope my cell matcher software did worked well!

Doc

I have no doubts it will go like a demon. My personal advice would be to take the multiple controller size/weight penalty (or copy ZombiesSS power stage and package it using liquid cooling to fit perhaps 6 of his 18fet to247 package fet boards and run 20S.

Your power level doesn't require the inherent lethal voltage risks. That controller is only used on there amazingly fast superbike, not on production products.

I realize you are selecting it and your pack voltage because that's what it takes with these pieces to make the best power. It is not the most efficient way, nor the most power dense way (even if you don't care about life safety and/or design a flawlessly humidity proof corona proof system.)

If you are committed to running hobby packs, shink over them with heavier wall premium shrink and handle them more delicately than egg shells. This is not because they are likely to explode, but just to minimize cracks in the slurry adhesion to the foils which causes increased micro gassing. Cells don't develop uber power density like Nanos from using a lot of binder. The laminated foil pouches in all pouch cells have microscopic pinholes in the PE coatings, if you make a design that treats the foils as though they are isolated, the tiny current paths from the pinholes result in increased gassing from electrolysis. Don't let condensing humidity hit the cut foil pouch material edges, it often causes delamination of the aluminum foil layer in the pouch long term. (Hobby cells most prone to it from thick foil in pouches.)

Running~20s to leverage the 100V silicon power density maxima at this time for MOSFETs would save you a ton of design work in dealing with HV bs to make it safe, and you can waste less heat in your controller. I love that you are building a 2 wheel rocket, I know that your system as spec'd will be stunningly fast, like the fantastic machine the brilliant Dr, Jones made.

Think about the trade off though, you can easily have less than 5ft total power conductor length in the traction harness if packed well on a motorcycle.

Even if you have 2 passes in parallel with 0000awg power cabling used for the whole 5ft harness, 10ft of 0000awg is ~8lbs with a heavy wall jacket.

8lbs of wire total even if you make a poorly packaged harness lenth of 5ft, and that 8lbs assumes the HV harness is weightless. When you add up the stuff you do to make the HV pack be a safe to work on long-term reliable battery, you will find the 8lbs of wire starts looking pretty good.

Thanks Luke for your comments in regard to help the Emus team.

You are an excellent reference as we know and i'm 100% sure you really know what you talk about when discussing about electric motorcycle :wink:


I'm very excited about the EMUS team, at least we have in Quebec a team that is building E-motorcycle for racing ! We also have the Sora from lito green motion that is a luxury E-motorcycles company.

I'm really proud of us guys!

Your first race will be in New Jersey at about 1100km from my home.. That would be about 6 levelII recharge with my Zero ZF15 to meet you there guys

Doc

I agree the system voltage is much too high but they are already committed. Now they need to roll with it but I do wish they were not using hobby grade pouches. Maybe it is not too late to switch to Farasis pouches :wink: or some high power 18650s

Just think of it as a course in high voltage system design. It will be a great learning experience. If you make one mistake you get a D (dead)

All they have to do to change their mind is remove the wrapping on a few of the nanotech packs. Absolutely horrible solder joints. Huge blobs of solder almost forming a dead short.

If Zero Motorcycles does not hook you up with Farasis cells you might also try to contacting Richard Hatfield directly to see if he can hook you up with some EnerDel cells. I met him at an airshow last year and he was super nice was willing to sell me cells direct. His bike has about the same horsepower and pack size as yours but runs 380V :wink:

EnerDel was bought by the Russians but they still make some mil grade quality cells.

http://lightningmotorcycle.com/product/specifications/

Hot damn that's amazing work!
I want one!

Our cells are optimized for safety, cycle life, and high energy density. You would need much more than 12kWh of them to meet your power goals.

The enerdel cells sound like a great choice.

Really nice job guys, I hope you do well!

-JD

liveforphysics said:

I have no doubts it will go like a demon. My personal advice would be to take the multiple controller size/weight penalty (or copy ZombiesSS power stage and package it using liquid cooling to fit perhaps 6 of his 18fet to247 package fet boards and run 20S.

I realize you are selecting it and your pack voltage because that's what it takes with these pieces to make the best power. It is not the most efficient way, nor the most power dense way (even if you don't care about life safety and/or design a flawlessly humidity proof corona proof system.)


Running~20s to leverage the 100V silicon power density maxima at this time for MOSFETs would save you a ton of design work in dealing with HV bs to make it safe, and you can waste less heat in your controller. I love that you are building a 2 wheel rocket, I know that your system as spec'd will be stunningly fast, like the fantastic machine the brilliant Dr, Jones made.

Click to expand...

Are you 100% sure about this?

http://www.cree.com/Power/Products/MOSFETs/TO247/C2M0025120D

These (or similar SiC) have probably the highest power density.

The cree part and a 650V STMicro part that costs $40/each does beat the best 100V stuff by a small margin for currently on the public market parts.

Yes, they are expensive. Cree 1200v and 40 mohm model is cheaper, and much easier to drive, so it can have less losses then 25 mohm model.

Thanks everyone for your support!

It's nice to read all of your comments.

Concerning the choice of batteries, we did an extensive survey of a lot of commercially available Lithium Cells. We roughly looked at 400 models. Size, weight, power and energy were the main parameters we looked at. Module assembly was also a big concern. This is a prototype bike and long term reliability isn't what we aimed for.
At one point we had to settle for a cell, because it had a great impact on chassis design and ergonomics. At this point, changing the cell for an 18650 or any other format would bring our schedule back too far for Varsity challenge and wouldn't fit in the chassis.

We are aware of the quality issues of the Turnigy, but with DoctorBass' matching software and our automated cycling bench we plan on cycling and characterizing every cell for internal resistance and nominal capacity, as well as detecting bad cells prior to assembly. We are very careful with those cells, we have made a bench test who give us information about the capacity of each cell and we have rejected some cells who don't respect the manufacturer specification.
At this moment we don't have the whole battery pack, we only have 1/3 of the pack, we did our testing at 200V and each cell worked well, no overheat,the pack stayed balance.

However we still need to gather 15000$ to buy all the cells required for the race. Any help is welcome.

You have very interesting comments and you have lot of experience. Our chassis design is made to be adaptable and regarding the number of cells we have to buy in the next months, if some of you have a contact in a company who can be interested to sponsor a lot of their cells, we can always change our minds

hobbyking isn't very generous

Have you thought about going direct to Aliexpress or Alibaba? I have a 20S 14P set up and sourced the cells from China! Hey that's where the Turnigy cells come from anyway.

Good luck with your project, I will be following with interest.


Bernel

Subscribed!

team_EMUS said:

Thanks everyone for your support!

It's nice to read all of your comments.

Concerning the choice of batteries, we did an extensive survey of a lot of commercially available Lithium Cells. We roughly looked at 400 models. Size, weight, power and energy were the main parameters we looked at. Module assembly was also a big concern. This is a prototype bike and long term reliability isn't what we aimed for.
At one point we had to settle for a cell, because it had a great impact on chassis design and ergonomics. At this point, changing the cell for an 18650 or any other format would bring our schedule back too far for Varsity challenge and wouldn't fit in the chassis.

We are aware of the quality issues of the Turnigy, but with DoctorBass' matching software and our automated cycling bench we plan on cycling and characterizing every cell for internal resistance and nominal capacity, as well as detecting bad cells prior to assembly. We are very careful with those cells, we have made a bench test who give us information about the capacity of each cell and we have rejected some cells who don't respect the manufacturer specification.
At this moment we don't have the whole battery pack, we only have 1/3 of the pack, we did our testing at 200V and each cell worked well, no overheat,the pack stayed balance.

However we still need to gather 15000$ to buy all the cells required for the race. Any help is welcome.

You have very interesting comments and you have lot of experience. Our chassis design is made to be adaptable and regarding the number of cells we have to buy in the next months, if some of you have a contact in a company who can be interested to sponsor a lot of their cells, we can always change our minds

hobbyking isn't very generous

Click to expand...

No matter how far you have traveled down the wrong path, the sooner you turn around the better.

This is a cool build. But I'm surprised you guys chose to use HK nano techs. If I was building something like this I would be temped to use the power cells from enerdel.
Or Zero/Farassis cells and then a small amount of rc lipo in parallel with the good cells. But as luke says. I would want to run at a lower voltage. The thing is with high voltage is its invisible so you might not see it when its about to kill you. Sure you can build it so its safe but what happens when the bike crashes is it going to be safe for the medic to pull off the rider???

I think We will see a slow shift to Lower voltages eventually something around 150v fully charged.

riba2233 said:

Yes, they are expensive. Cree 1200v and 40 mohm model is cheaper, and much easier to drive, so it can have less losses then 25 mohm model.

Click to expand...

I want to chime in on this one.

You are doing it wrong... LiveForPhysics too, sorry Luke.

1. The Cree is small and way low power
2. The TO-247s are small and don't make sense for a high voltage high power application
3. Power electronics is my crack cocaine lately and I've been on a research bender. Steady diet of strippers and power device technology. I'm freaky like that.
4. I wound an inductor to do double pulse testing on a strippers bottom... smooth (the inductor wind).

If one is to build something, it should be righteously ridiculously awesome! Something that scares children with plasma arcs awesome. Something the propels a human projectile at a rate of acceleration that feels like Zeus himself is the power source.
To that I submit http://www.pwrx.com/Product/FMF1200DX1-24A

I'm not sure how many people actually understand what SiC means for power devices beyond being a buzzword as I only know a few designers and only one who has done work with SiC devices (I'll be joining soon enough, but mine are still in the packaging).

I don't think a team would have the time required to design build, test and debug a controller, probably 2yrs to NEVER unless they know a pro that has worked at this power level, I don't know any.

They made the correct choice for pretty much everything from where I sit and they did it with a killer tight budget. This is hot rodding, not measurabating to who has the best spec sheet. $75k, custom chassis from scratch, off the shelf high power drive system? Wow!

If you don't know who RMS is, go look them up, I just did, race proven and winning under VERY difficult demands slinging big power in a harsh environment, nuff said.

Right now, today the easiest way to get big power is high voltage, why re-invent the wheel? Goal is to race motorcycles not win design competitions. Notices they said it would have been cheaper to to re purpose an existing bike? A ground up design is not easy or fast to do, but it was the best design choice for them, kudos.

This project has enough engineering challenges already.

Now some constructive criticism / questions for the team.
Batteries, yup, not the greatest, but will they work? Probably for a while, 40km? That might be pushing it

You stated 243 batteries is the volume of the battery and that the pack is 600V and mentioned 200V modules. I'm guessing that's a 162ish S/2P pack.

160kW / 600V = 267A, 90kW continuous = 150A... Is the stock wiring on those packs going to be enough? I know it's OK to run wiring much hotter than is found on online charts, but do you feel the batteries are good enough to live through 75-130A discharges each? Remember that the ratings on these cells are usually for RC stuff that can only spike these high currents for maybe a few seconds at most. That's a sprint not a marathon, you need endurance. Those cells might heat up on you even with air cooling under continuous use. If you have already studied this could you post some info?

I might chime in too -

You guys have gone about this the right way. I personally wouldn't be using HobbyKing packs as they have a pretty high dud rate. That's why I buy individual 40C cells from Herewin and sort them myself.

The Rinehart controller is a beast, and one of the easiest to use and program. The guys at Rinehart are super helpful and very keen to see you win using their technology.

The motor will present it's challenges, but you've done well to fit it where you have - about the best spot going for it really.

I managed to build my 700 V, 150 kW race bike for about $45,000, maybe a little more. Custom frame, high end components and a very well thought out battery pack. It rocks, and is the safest bike out there by a good two laps. I would ride Voltron Evo in the pissing rain before I threw a leg over some of the other bikes on a humid afternoon.

The lanyard requirement is essential - when that pops out, the whole bike should shut down and the battery must break down into non-lethal voltages immediately for the safety of the rider and the marshals. I presume this is one of the eRoadracing rules, but if not, do it anyway.

Finally, the maximum current we ever see on our bike is about 240 amps, and at this point you are already doing 260 km/h. Compare that to a 150 volt bike which would be pulling nearly 1000 amps. Who is more likely to have an onboard fire?

Nice work guys, and I look forward to seeing Voltron racing against you in 2016