In the 2016 Formula Hybrid Competition, students from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham secured third position in the ‘Hybrid in Progress’ category. The team made their debut appearance, building a race car for the first time.
Founded and run by the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth since 2006, Formula Hybrid takes place each spring at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon, NH. The competition is part of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Collegiate Design Series and is regarded as the most complex and dynamic of the series.
The Formula Hybrid Competition is an interdisciplinary design and engineering challenge for undergraduate and graduate students of the institution. They must collaboratively design and build a formula-style electric or plug-in hybrid racecar and compete in a series of events. This educational competition emphasizes drivetrain innovation and fuel efficiency in a high-performance application.
Engineering a hybrid provides an unparalleled interdisciplinary hands-on experience that requires students to innovate across mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering disciplines. Hybrid drivetrains present great challenges. The best solutions often result when engineers work together across boundaries. Engineering companies and several of the world’s major automotive manufacturers support Formula Hybrid due to the high quality of engineers who have learned to work outside of their chosen disciplines.
The student team from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, under the guidance of Joshua David Freeman and Sambhu R., Assistant Professor, took up this challenge, paving their way from a small village in India called ‘Vallickavu’ to New Hampshire Motor Speedway, the Mecca of NASCAR racing.
From the very inception of the project it was guided and blessed by the Chancellor Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, our beloved Amma, so much that when the team Captain went to the campus Associate Dean Dr. Balakrishna Shankar and told him that the team wanted to build a hybrid car, he just said “BUILD IT…!!!”
The Team ‘Agraganya’ is now all set to build a better, faster and a more sustainable car for the 2017 event. The team has wisely used the formula hybrid platform to form alliances with universities including University of Victoria (the current winners), Dartmouth College of Engineering and Atilim University from Turkey for exchange of ideas and engineering resources. The team has also used the opportunity to find industrial support from electric mobility industry leaders like ‘LG-Chem’ and ‘Intra-links’.
