In a nutshell: Every September, the Guinness Book of World Records sits in on a little drag race between faculty students. The seat is reserved as a result of these largely untelevised races are identified for pushing absolutely the limits of tiny electric automobiles, and incessantly, a crew makes acceleration historical past.
Applied sciences students from ETH Zurich and Lucerne University have damaged the world report for acceleration in an electric car. The University of Stuttgart held the earlier report, set final 12 months when it despatched its car screaming down the observe, going from zero to 100 km/h (62.15 mph) in 1.461 of a second. This week, the students from Zurich crushed that displaying with a time of simply under one second (0.956 of a second) and a distance of 12.3 meters.
The students are Academic Motorsports Club Zurich (AMZ) members and spent a 12 months constructing the car they named “Mythen.” The crew suffered a number of setbacks and needed to spend each minute of their free time tuning and swapping elements. All their onerous work paid off as driver Kate Maggetti set the world acceleration report for electric autos in entrance of Guinness judges on a check observe in Duebendorf, Switzerland.
“Working on the venture in addition to my research was very intense. But even so, it was a lot of enjoyable working with different students to repeatedly produce new options and put into apply what we realized in class. And, after all, it’s an completely distinctive expertise to be concerned in a world report,” mentioned AMZ head Yann Bernard.
Despite all its sponsor decals, Mythen appears to be like extra like a go-cart than a race car, however that is intentional. To break the world report, the crew wanted to make a chassis small and lightweight sufficient that their 240-kilowatt motors may propel it at unbelievable pace.
The crew built and optimized all Mythen’s elements from scratch, together with the PCBs, chassis, and battery. The chassis was fashioned from carbon and aluminum, and the car solely weighs 140 kilos (309 kilos). The drivetrain consists of four-wheel hub motors operating at a whole of 326 horsepower.
Of course, all of the horsepower in the world does you no good if you happen to can’t switch that energy to the bottom. Aerodynamics was some of the difficult features of Mythen’s design.
“But energy is not the one factor that issues on the subject of setting an acceleration report – successfully transferring that energy to the bottom can also be key,” mentioned AMZ’s head of aerodynamics, Dario Messerli. “The floor impact alone virtually doubles the contact pressure.”
Since spoilers and wings solely work above sure speeds, the AMZ crew devised aerodynamics under the car that successfully suck it to the observe proper off the road. The students’ resolution created almost doubled the downward pressure as a comparable car.
The students don’t anticipate to carry on to the report for lengthy. The occasion is held each September, with groups studying extra from the 12 months prior. The AMZ crew has already held the report twice – as soon as in 2014 and once more in 2016. The Swiss students anticipate their rivals from the University of Stuttgart to placed on a stronger displaying subsequent 12 months. So they need to work simply as onerous to keep up their hard-fought report.