Mary Cools Off Before Heading to Competition

While DYNO testing at the Transportation Research Institute, we found that our vehicle's power electronics cooling loop was getting too hot, which could be a huge problem at EcoCAR 2 Final Competition.

“If the loop gets too hot, components can get damaged and can hinder us at competition,” said Kelvin Jan, a member of the mechanical team.

In the original model of the vehicle, there was only one power electronic radiator. However, in order to make the vehicle a hybrid-electric vehicle, we added a UQM motor, inverter, a P2 motor, a Rinehart inverter and a DC/DC converter. Quite a bit, huh? These newly-integrated components added too much heat for the stock radiator to handle.

All three electronic radiators in series.

To fix this problem, we needed to find a way to reject more heat from our power electronics cooling loop. First, we used the data we obtained at the Emission Testing Event to do some rough calculations. We determined that two additional power electronic radiators would be needed to do the job.

After checking the CAD model to make sure that there would be enough room for the radiators, Jan designed brackets to mount them. We routed the coolant lines so that the radiators are in a series, moving the original inlet hose to the bottom radiator so that the coolant can flow through all the radiators, while the outlet remains the same. Upon installing the radiators, we ran short tests and found that the coolant loop was running at a lower temperature than it did at the ETE.

“These were just preliminary tests to see if our solution fixed the problem,” Jan said. “Further, more rigorous tests will be conducted in the coming weeks to make sure Mary is competition ready.”