TransForum Vol. 8, No. 2

Mississippi State University Wins Challenge X

Mississippi University's First Place Challenge X Vehicle

Mississippi State University is the first place winner of Challenge X, a four-year student competition that pitted 17 university teams from the U.S. and Canada against one another to engineer advanced powertrain solutions that would achieve high fuel economy and low emissions without sacrificing performance and utility. The award was announced by U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman and presented in Washington, D.C., in May.

Starting in 2004 and during each year of the competition, the teams followed General Motor’s (GM’s) Global Vehicle Development Process and integrated their advanced technology solutions into a Chevrolet Equinox, a GM crossover vehicle that combines elements of both a sport utility vehicle and a passenger car.

The Mississippi State University team designed and engineered a through-the-road (TTR) parallel hybrid electric vehicle with all-wheel drive using a 1.9L GM sourced turbocharged direct injection diesel engine fueled by B20 biodiesel. Their vehicle demonstrated a 38 percent increase in energy efficiency over the production vehicle, a 1.6 second better quarter-mile acceleration performance, and a 44 percent reduction in well-to-wheel greenhouse gas emissions.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory provided competition management, team evaluation, and technical and logistical support. The Greenhouse gas, Regulated Emissions, and Energy in Transportation (GREET) model, developed at Argonne, was used to assess the well-to-wheel analysis of the greenhouse gas impacts of each technology approach the teams selected.

In addition, the wireless data transmission feature of the Argonne Real-Time Data Acquisition (ARDAQ) system, which provides onboard data collection and diagnostics, was used to report the status of all vehicles during the road rally from New York City to Washington, D.C. The competition vehicles formed a rolling mesh network via WIFI modems and Argonne software. One of the rally vehicles was used to upload ARDAQcollected data to the Challenge X data server through a modem. The status and position of each vehicle was displayed in nearreal- time on Google Earth maps.

The second place vehicle was engineered by a team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and used a TTR parallel hybrid electric vehicle with a 1.9L diesel engine fueled by B20 biodiesel. Ohio State University was awarded third place for its power-split hybrid electric vehicle with a diesel engine fueled by B20 biodiesel.

The next student vehicle competition, EcoCAR: The NeXt Challenge (TransForum 8:1), begins this fall. Seventeen university teams will participate.

November 2008