EcoCAR 3: Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition

Event Operations Description

Date Modified: 2/3/2015

Event Name: Mechanical Presentation

Location: TBD Room, Renaissance Downtown, Seattle, WA
Event Date: Tuesday, June 2nd – Wednesday, June 3rd
Event Time(s): TBD
Event Captains: Ed Argalas, General Motors

A. Objective
The Mechanical Track for year one of EcoCAR 3 is focused on team engineering activity in the selection, packaging,
and performance modeling of mechanical subsystems to create a vehicle that meets competition VTS. The
Mechanical Event presentation should summarize this activity for year one, identifying appropriate team goals,
engineering methods, and results. Emphasis will be placed on evaluating the selection of the proposed mechanical
architecture, risk/benefit analysis of selected components and expected performance vs. stated VTS.

The focus of this presentation is technical: what specific goals for the vehicle determined VTS values, how these
goals drove selection of specific mechanical subsystems, and how the desired mechanical subsystems are to be
packaged into the vehicle. A detailed discussion of analysis/strategy employed to confirm the chosen components
meet the safety, fuel economy and dynamics targets of the competition must be provided, especially for
components requiring approval via the mechanical waiver process. All modeling, performance analysis and
simulation results should be presented in detail, concisely and quickly.

This event will be judged by a group of industry and government professionals familiar with vehicle safety, structural
and mechanical design, and vehicle development.

B. Procedure
The judging for this event will be 40 minutes in length and will be held in a conference room with appropriate
audio/visual presentation equipment. Each team will have a maximum of 25 minutes for their technical
presentation followed by 10 minutes of questions/answers from the judges. There will be 5 minutes in between
each team’s presentation for judges to complete their score sheet.

Teams will be required to pre-load their presentation on to the master event laptop during their scheduled
presentation preparation time (to be released at a later date). Changes will not be permitted to the presentation
after they have been loaded onto the master laptop. Presentation graphics must use Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 or
later. The master laptop, projector and projection screen will be provided and will not be the responsibility of the
team.

Each team can select up to two team members (not faculty) to give the presentation. At least one of the team
members must be an undergraduate and a significant portion of the presentation (at least 30%) must be delivered
by him or her. If a team finds this requirement to be a hardship, discuss the situation with the event captain prior to
the competition. Approval for relief from this requirement must be obtained prior to the competition. Either of the
two team presenters may answer judges’ questions, and only the team presenters are permitted to provide
answers. Only authorized individuals (presenters, their faculty advisors, team members and event officials) will be
allowed in the presentation area during the event (non-participating team members may observe the event from
the back of the room). Violators will be assessed a penalty per Section F-12 of the NYS Rules. Penalties are assessed
by the competition organizers, not event captains.

EC3 Y1 EOD – Mechanical Event Page 1 of 3

 C. Content
From above, the presentation focus is on team engineering activity in selection, packaging, and performance
modeling to meet EcoCAR 3 year one goals. As part of this presentation, teams must address the following:

1. Introduction, vehicle technical specifications (VTS) and mechanical architecture

 Introduce your team and any unique aspects of your program
 Identify team infrastructure and engineering process employed to develop year one virtual design
 Introduce your vehicle architecture and unique features in a one slide summary format at the
beginning of your presentation.
 Briefly describe your overall VTS and compare to both competition requirements and targets
2. Discuss mechanical component selection
 Highlight the most influential VTS requirement(s) that drove your mechanical component selection
 Describe how the components were selected to meet these requirements
3. Discuss mechanical component packaging
 Describe the packaging strategy for all of the critical mechanical components in the team’s
architecture
 Discuss the impacts on passenger capacity and cargo capacity resulting from the packaging activity
 Describe structural changes proposed to the base vehicle to package mechanical components (i.e.
powertrain/driveline components, energy storage system, fuel handing components). For each
structural change:
o Briefly describe the work required to complete the design and then build it and integrate it
in future years
o Identify if the modification requires a waiver
 For one structural change, discuss simulation and analysis results that support your design
4. Briefly review performance modeling and analysis activity to support your year one design
 Identify changes to vehicle mass and mass distribution resulting from your design
 Identify expected changes to chassis components to rebalance the vehicle ride and handling, if any
 Describe the powertrain thermal management systems in the vehicle and present analysis
supporting the design
5. Briefly discuss engineering methodology and planning processes for the mechanical swimlane
 Identify any resource constraint experiences in year one (analysis tools/human resources/learning
curve) and describe how these constraints were dealt with
 Identify the most challenging aspect of, or highest risk design in, the mechanical subsystem and
discuss plans to mitigate the risk or overcome the challenge
6. Briefly review how your team will maintain consistency in knowledge transfer throughout the four years of
EcoCAR 3, and provide lessons learned from the Year One design activity
 Discuss how the team infrastructure and process will management the handoff to the year two
team and the vehicle build

D. Event Timing
Event Set-Up Time TBD
Vehicle Set-Up Time N/A
Event Run Time (Per Team) 40min
Event Tear-Down Time N/A

E. Volunteers
Conf.
Name Affiliation Role Phone E-mail
(Y/N)
Runner
EC3 Y1 EOD – Mechanical Event Page 2 of 3
 F. Judges (Static events only)
Conf.
Name Affiliation Phone E-mail
(Y/N)

Questions:
1 When will the Judges need to arrive? Any time Monday, June 1st
2 When will the Judges be finished with their After 2PM PT on Wednesday, June 3rd
event?
3 Are there additional materials you want No
distributed to your Judges at the
competition? Please list the materials and
indicate who is responsible for this
material.

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