eLIMO Team

Members of the eLIMO team after the first successful run of the drive train
Left to right: Steve Schild, MATC advisor, with eLIMO team members
Jason Havlovik, Edward Speck-Kern, Ping-Shing Wong and Masahiro Tsoyoshu

Student design teams have been working for the last couple years on a project to convert a Public Safety LIMO from the traditional internal combustion engine-powered vehicle to a completely electric-powered vehicle. The environmental impact of this conversion is huge. Calculations predict that a gasoline-powered engine releases more carbon dioxide into the air per vehicle hour of operation than a coal-fired power plant releases in the same amount of time. Therefore an electric-powered vehicle, even if it were powered by electricity generated by a coal-fired power plant, substantially reduces the carbon footprint of that vehicle.
 
An important milestone was reached by the eLIMO team. The electric-powered vehicle now has an operating drive train; when the electric motor is activated it spins the drive shaft which provides power to the wheels which means the wheels spin. An operating drive train is a deceptively simple statement.  To achieve this result the team added an entire academic year of design, engineering, construction and testing to the work already done on this project in the 2007-2008 academic year. 

Once the drive train was operational the team began testing the vehicle operation with regenerative braking, a feature of the type of electric motor being used in this vehicle. Regenerative braking recaptures the energy of motion of the vehicle as electricity when the brakes are applied instead of dissipating this energy as heat, which is what happens in a standard gasoline-powered vehicle when brakes are applied. The recaptured electricity increases the operational efficiency of the vehicle. The team will now analyze the data from these tests and conduct further testing. The eLIMO project is housed at the Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC) Oak Creek campus automotive facility.

Joseph St. Marie (left) and Matthew Webber (right), eLIMO team members,
checking installation of drive shaft support bearings