And now for something entirely different…

I’m sick of cars. Fed up with traffic, stress, and pollution. It makes no sense to drive a four-seater alone everyday.
This summer I’ve come to realize something: cars are the past. The future is in flexible personal mobility. And I’m not one to live in the past.
I had already read a thousand [...]

Another semester finished. Balance time and my first paper.

We finally wrapped up our group works. Yes, we dragged our feet like sloths on this one (school ended almost two months ago). Or rather, we definitely bit off more than our part-time researcher lives allow us to chew.
Anyway, if you’d like to read the more or less full account of our work in the [...]

Genetic mangling of electric motors

As has been said before, we’ve taken an Intelligent Algorithm approach to our motor design framework.
We started by adding a Genetic Algorithm to the MotorFemmulator project code, and left it running on a 7 computer improvised cluster. It has yielded some results, namely the optimization of a motor from 44Nm (5kW) to 200Nm (23kW) at [...]

Overcoming FEMM limitations

Just like any other software, FEMM has its limitations.
I’ve been talking a lot to David Meeker, the author, who has been extremely kind and thoughtful in guiding me not only in the program’s usage but also in general electromagnetic modeling, while trying to sort out the modeling mess I’ve put myself and my colleague into [...]

The wheelmotor goes to school

I finally got the chance to officially push my wheelmotor project into my master’s.
By an incredible strike of luck, I teamed up with a class mate that is also extremely interested in sustainable energy and electric propulsion; not only that but he also has experience in Octave development and is keen in applying that to [...]

Rethinking the project

After 1 year and 2 months, I have very little to show for results.
There is this software framework that produces sketchy models of wheel-motors which have no guarantee of real-world performance. And a web site full of interesting bits of information, a few intelligent discussions, and a handful of very nice and techie web friends. [...]

The braking problem – energy analysis

I’ve been just talking about regenerative braking for too long. It’s time to define the requirements.
When trying to dimension ultracapacitors or batteries for regen braking, we have to take into account the energy and power of the braking in it’s worst case: from top speed down to zero, and in the shortest time possible. Let’s [...]

Back to school

I realized it is almost impossible for a family man with a full-time job to pull this project together in useful time, especially when trying to develop a crucial and complex component such as the hub motor.
So I’m changing my life in order to accommodate the project.

Architecture redone

After careful consideration of the usage cases and a few other deployment constraints, I remade the architectural document.
The plan now spans 4 phases, instead of 3. Just being careful.
This time I also included a sub-project breakdown. Boy, this thing really is big… so far its weight is 18 different work packages. Yummy. Work, work, work.
It [...]

Architectural Overview

It’s about time I put things down on paper and see what’s missing.
I’ve written a high-level requirement specification of the whole system (click for PDF).
It outlines my approach in 3 phases (Motor Development, Parallel HEV, Serial HEV) as well as the layout of the electric system for each phase.
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