2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In the face of global environmental problems and the rapid rise in oil prices, hybrid vehicles are a better choice than traditional fuel vehicles. However, purchasing a new hybrid car can be a bit expensive. We will develop a combination device that can be installed on an old gas car, giving it the advantages of a hybrid car. Companies such as Tesla and Toyota have developed similar technology. Still, our objective is to put our system into old cars, save people’s money and allow people to spend a little money to get most of the advantages of Hybrid cars.

The core idea of the design is the electric motor can provide extra power when the fuel engine is running at low speed because at low speed the fuel engine needs extra fuel consumption, which pollutes the environment and wastes fuel. We also put an energy harvesting device on the brakes to recover the kinetic energy during braking and store it in the battery to save more energy. Owing to the limited materials and space, we will verify the feasibility of our set-up on a go-kart. These steps include refurbishing the entire frame of the car to install required components such as the engine, electric motor, battery pack, etc. The most important part is to verify the fuel economy of the unit, we will compare the fuel consumption with the fuel engine alone and with the hybrid unit.

This paper shares a sample project illustrating a new teaching approach via innovation. One of the objectives of the Experiential Engineering Education and this paper is to reform engineering education by moving away from the boundaries of traditional classroom-based approaches to project-based approaches using real world situations. This new teaching approach can improve the effectiveness of engineering education. We hope that the benefits of this teaching approach shown using this sample project-based learning could serve as a model for other educators.