I had the pleasure of helping several high school teams in Georgia prepare for the 2000 and 2002 FutureCar Student Challenge. See http://www.fccstudentchallenge.org/
In both years' competitions, student teams used Advisor to study and evaluate EVs and hybrids. Matlab and Advisor were provided by the competition organizers to competing high school teams for free. I spent a good deal of time using the Advisor software and devising study problems and design exercises for the students. Advisor can be downloaded for free from NREL (see http://www.ctts.nrel.gov/analysis/) However, you have to purchase or have a copy of Matlab on your PC to run it. There is also an AdvisorLite program - I do not know details about it. The program provided to students came with many default and standard input files for various motors, engines, energy storage systems, transmissions, control systems, and chassis. You can "assemble" a variety of vehicles and test them under many different simulation scenarios and do standard EPA fuel economy and emissions testing. I looked into creating data files for one of the school's Ranger pick-up conversion so we could do more detailed analysis and comparisons to real-world data. We got busy with other things and program documentation was not very complete for enabling high school students to accomplish this. Still, the program can provide useful information and allow you to evaluate concepts quickly without ever building anything (good and bad). Students were able to design and simulate vehicles with great performance, range, and drivability within certain constraints using "off-the-shelf components". Unfortunately, Advisor does not include any economic analysis or cost data so while their designs were impressive, they may not be economically viable. -Alan Alan C. Shedd, P.E. Advisor to Georgia's Electric Vehicle Education Program (cell) 770-654-0027 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Prasad" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2002 10:16 PM Subject: Re: anybody using ADVISOR > Hi Martin and all, > > Yes the Matlab program is very expensive. But ADVISOR has so much data that > it is a good way to learn EVs, to start with. Actually, I open all the '.m' > files as text files and see what information I can gather. Some of the > calculations (very simple ones) can be done by us, and if you are an expert > in matrices, you don't need a computer!! > > Prasad > http://www.geocities.com/aquariangenius > http://members.fortunecity.com/aquariangenius > > _____________________________________________________________________ > > > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Martin Jackson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: "EV Discussion List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Sent: Friday, September 20, 2002 2:38 AM > Subject: anybody using ADVISOR > > > > Hi Prasad; > > > > "Is there anyone on the list using ADVISOR (from NREL) to evaluate your > > EVs." > > > > The MATLAB program is used to run the full ADVISOR modeling system. > > This is an expensive program out of my reach. The ADVISOR package > > contains a lot of data for components of a vehicle, so just that might > > make it worth downloading. Only some of the tables are human readable. > > ______________________________________________________________________ > > >
