Race cars are known for their brilliant acceleration as well as cornering performance. This requires optimization of each and every component of the car to shed every ounce of extra weight while maximizing the performance. This paper focuses on optimization of the powertrain of a Formula Student electric vehicle. The electric vehicle in question is a Formula style rear-wheel driven electric single person race car. The rear wheel drive is achieved with separate motors for each wheel controlled by electronic differential. Extensive research has been done in the area of gear design and several standards have been set. This paper follows the AGMA 2001-D04 standard as given in Shigley’s Mechanical Engineering Design [4]. A planetary gearbox was developed for a Formula Student vehicle with permanent magnet DC motor by Bakshi[2] et al. This paper tries to optimize the planetary gearbox and considers other suitable designs.

A racing vehicle requires to be designed for optimum performance, stability and maneuverability considering all situations like straight line acceleration and high speed cornering. The car is driven close to its tractive limits and a control system becomes inevitable to manifest utmost performance of the car. In this paper, the focus is on design of an electronic differential for a rear wheel driven Formula Student Electric vehicle, with each rear wheel driven by separate motors. The electronic differential (e-diff) is aimed at both straights and corners, which is fulfilled by considering objective parameters, which assist in cornering by improving yaw rate and straights by improving traction. However, in this paper we shall focus on cornering only. The paper looks at various possible control strategies for obtaining desired values of certain parameters and describes in detail implementation of a yaw rate controlled system. A vehicle model is created on MATLAB/Simulink platform to look at changes in vehicle behavior in response to various control strategies. The model consists of vehicle dynamics and driver models developed by the authors. The coupled model simulates the vehicle performance on any given track and provides the variation of required parameters. Iterations are done and the results are used to tune the controller parameters to optimize performance on tight turns and overall lap times at the endurance event at the Formula Student competition.