ESTACYCLE: a new hybrid electric tricycle project selected by ADEME
A new hybrid electric tricycle project
Fifteen 5th-year students, supervised by the School’s teacher-researchers, are working on ESTACYCLE, a new project for a mass-produced hybrid tricycle with supercapacitors. The project has been selected for the eXtreme Challenge by ADEME, which aims to develop new low-emission, efficient, low-carbon intelligent vehicles.
ESTACYCLE, an eco-designed mass-produced hybrid tricycle that manages human energy smartly
The ESTACYCLE team is made up of 15 5th-year students from 3 options: Project Mode Design Engineering (PMDE), Eco-mobility and Vehicle Lightening. They are currently working on the preliminary study before kicking off the vehicle design phase.
The vehicle will be inspired by the technological building blocks of a mass-produced hybrid tricycle with solar panels and supercapacitors, developed at ESTACA’LAB. It is based on the principles of a battery-less electric bicycle developed for Edgar Tournon’s thesis, entitled: “Optimal design of a mass-produced hybrid electric-assist bicycle using supercapacitors.” The thesis, presented in 2020, was co-supervised by ESTACA and Claude Bernard University in Lyon, and financed by the company STEE.
The students in the project are putting their mechanical skills to use for this project, power transmission with electric assistance, solar panels and converters, energy management (supercapacitor or battery), the man/machine interface (control and screen), the chassis design … and also notions of transport use and economy.
A project selected for ADEME’s eXtrème déf
This project is being funded as part of the eXtrême Déf by the ADEME (French Agency for Ecological Transition), an open and innovative approach to designing tomorrow’s vehicles. Objective: to do 100 times better than everyday cars with a collection of vehicles, carrying 1 to 2 people and a load of 100kg or 3 people and their bags.
ADEME is offering teams the opportunity to imagine, prototype and produce new vehicles, half-way between a bicycle and a car, that are economical and efficient, sustainable, simple and inexpensive, and which can replace cars commutes in suburban and rural areas. The vehicles will be designed to be upgradable, refurbishable, and have a very long life, assembled and maintained locally. They will be tested in more than 200 partner municipalities by residents who want to try them out for several weeks in real-life conditions.
The eXtrème déf is held over three years. The first phase, in 2022, is the idea generation phase. It includes a community of more than 600 people; 43 teams of at least 3 people (entrepreneurs, industrialists, researchers, teachers, etc.) who will be designing 43 vehicle concepts (or families of vehicles) all meeting the eXtreme Specifications. The detailed design, prototyping and testing phase will start in 2023 and the third phase will consist of small-scale production by the finalist teams in 2024.
