Northeastern Student Club Drives Major Innovation with Custom Electric Race Cars
The student-led Northeastern Electric Racing club is rapidly rising through the ranks of national engineering challenges by building custom, competition-ready electric race cars entirely in-house. The year-long process provides students with intense, hands-on experience in advanced software, circuit design, and hardware fabrication that gives them a distinct edge when entering the workforce.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cody Mello-Klein. Main photo: For the members of Northeastern Electric Racing, designing and building an electric race car in a year is a worthwhile engineering challenge. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
Northeastern Electric Racing is a new competitor bringing major innovation
This student club builds custom electric race cars that have performed well in national engineering challenges despite its status as a relative newcomer. For students, it’s an experience like no other.
Riyana Roy has been interested in cars ever since she was a Hot Wheels-collecting, NASCAR-watching child. Now, she’s designing them.
Roy and the team of more than 100 engineers at Northeastern Electric Racing, a student club at Northeastern University, have poured their blood, sweat and tears into bringing custom, competition-ready electric race cars to life. In the span of four years, the club has been ranked at national and regional competitions alongside university teams that have existed for 30 years.
Through all-nighters pulled in the club’s underground engineering bay and the highs and lows of competition, the engineers in the racing club push their physical and mental limits, grow skills that help them secure jobs and forge friendships that last a lifetime. But most of all, Roy said, they have fun.
“The feeling of seeing the car drive for the first time or seeing the car pass all of our technical inspections at competition, that’s a feeling that you can’t beat,” said Roy, the club’s incoming president and a senior data science and business administration student. “Experiencing it with the people you’ve worked so hard with who understand what you went through is pretty unique and very special.”
Northeastern Electric Racing is now in its fourth year competing at the national Formula SAE competition and regional Formula Hybrid+Electric competition. To build an electric race car capable of passing rigorous technical tests by competition judges and speeding down a track at 80 miles per hour is challenging enough. Doing so in a year makes the process even more intense.
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Building an electric race requires a combination of engineering know-how, software wizardry and management skills, fostering growth for the students involved in Northeastern Electric Racing. Photos by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
The team’s engineering bay, located in the tunnels underneath Northeastern’s Boston campus, is often a hive of activity, as the team of electrical, mechanical, industrial and computer engineering students constantly makes adjustments to improve the car’s performance.
In addition to mechanical components like wheels and a chassis, software and computer code control many of an electric car’s capabilities, explained Chris Pyle, the racing club’s chief software engineer and a third-year computer science student. Code is used to process inputs from the car’s steering wheel and pedals, and the club’s engineers even use software to run simulations on “how the car will behave at different turns and different positions,” Pyle said.
NER’s car is largely a custom-built machine. Many teams will buy the components to build their car. At Northeastern, everything from the chassis that frames the car to the software that helps run it is made in-house by students. The car’s on-track performance is part of what determines a team’s performance in the competitions. But team members’ ability to rank is largely about the engineering and design of the car, so these in-house decisions become even more important, Pyle said.
It helps them have more control over the vehicle, but it also means they have to learn skills that most students might never pick up during university.
“You have to make sure you know all of your budget,” said Max Meoli, a third-year electrical engineering student. “You have to make sure you reach out to your manufacturers to get all of your parts in time.”
Read full story at Northeastern Global News