Eli-Kart and Motor

After a busy spring semester, I'm finally done! As I mentioned in my last post, I was an assistant for the electric vehicle section of 2.007. To go along with this, I worked on Eli-Kart for my undergraduate thesis. Now that the semester is over, I can tell you all about it. But first, a video!

Eli-Kart's design has remained largely the same. See how similar they look? However, I also designed and built a large custom brushless motor that could be used to replace the hobby aircraft motor seem in the original design. I used FEA and CAD to help with the design. Here's an exploded rendering of the motor, along with the results of my finite element analysis on the motor using FEMM.

With the hobby motor, Eli-Kart tops out at about 20mph and has good acceleration (depending on the load). The motor overheats if you beast it too much though, but its good for cruising. If you're interested in learning more about the process, I created an Instructable that details the design of both the go-kart and motor.