To help celebrate UC Irvine’s 50th anniversary, improve our public outreach, and search for sponsor donations to help fund AR-10 Electra (Anteater Racing’s Electric Formula SAE car) we brought out Epsilon, originally an internal combustion FSAE car which was converted to electric a few years ago after a successful competition season.

Epsilon was converted as a working prototype for a PhD Thesis on Torque Vectoring by Patrick Hu who now runs a start-up company converting internal combustion cars to electric. Torque Vectoring is an exciting new technology that can be used in place of a car’s differential. When a car goes around a corner the inside and outside wheels have to spin at different speeds to allow the car to turn effectively. Torque vectoring actively changes the velocity and torque differential between the wheels turning the outside wheel faster than the inside wheel which helps turn the car.

Torque vectoring is a technology that lends itself to electric motors because it is fairly easy to place a motor at every wheel you want to actively control and vary the current sent to each wheel instead of relying on comparatively heavy and complex active differentials and clutches. Epsilon’s system uses two electric motors (one driving each rear wheel through a single speed chain drive) and relies on steering angle, throttle input, and the motor speed curve to interpolate tabulated values from its computer code to control the torque going to each rear wheel. It is a simple and fast feed forward system which is lightweight at dramatically improves turning performance.

All the kids present loved the car and their parents loved that they were so interested and excited about engineering. We had some good conversations with possible sponsors and alumni and had a great time. You can check out more pictures of the event on our facebook page https://www.facebook.com/uciracing