Electric scooter (2013)
Along with friends, I designed and built up an electric scooter to provide cheap and clean transportation options in crowded cities of India, where motorcycles and scooters are commonplace. We applied some of the aerodynamics equations to calculate the air resistance to assess the power requirements at different stages, including acceleration, maintaining velocity against constant air resistance, moving up or down the slope, etc. This finally led us to pick a motor and batteries of suitable configuration. Although the method was crude, assembling all the components worked well after a struggle of a few months. The scooter was able to accelerate from 0 to 50 km/h in 6 seconds with a range of 30 kms. This performance was (maybe still is) better than any other electric scooter available in Indian markets. Though technological success, we could not handle the financial sides had to give up. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed working on the project.