📂 projects/the_kart/
The Kart
My senior design 2026 project for the Riccio College of Engineering's ECE department at UMass Amherst involves making a hybrid go-kart with active aerodynamics for maximum acceleration through strong tire grip.
For starters, hell no, this wasn't assigned to us. Since sophomore year of college or so, I've always wanted to make a go-kart or some other form of electric propulsion to zip around UMass's big campus, and found that the senior design project would be a good opportunity to build it. This year, the course coordinators opened up the enrollment to allow teams one MIE student to fufill that student's senior design project and tech elective requirement with this class. One of my close high school buddies in mechanical engineering decided to make use of this opportunity and design the mechanical stuff for our project. This is great, because I totally lack a mechanical mindset, and if I had to make a chassis myself, I'd just be aimlessly welding tube metal until I had something that worked. Another buddy of mine in ECE is really passionate about cars and happily took up the job of rebuilding and tuning a motorcycle engine for use in the go-kart. Personally, I'm not as much of a car guy as my friends are, but I can enjoy racing around and slamming gears on occasion. Anyways, this whole project grew really out of scope because we all have wanted to build something similar for some time, so we decided to give it our fullest. For reference, the normal projects that take form in my department's senior design project involve metal detectors, pothole detectors, antenna stuff, and whatnot. We aim to take first place people's choice at demo day next semester.
The general design is something along the lines of a tube frame chassis that uses Miata knuckles for suspension and some BMW car's differential and axle. There will be a fan in the rear that blows air through an underfloor wind tunnel to create static downforce. The Kawasaki ZX11 engine will tether to the electric motor, and then to the drivetrain to provide power. That's about all I can vouch for, as again I am not terribly mechanical but have heard the other nerds on the project talk about these things on occasion.
My responsibility of the project is to provide electric power to the driveshaft of this kart. I've already purchased a Motenergy ME1306 PMSM motor, a Kelly KLS48100NC controller, and a 24V Porsche Taycan battery module. I've already tested these out, and they exceed my expectations already. The plan is to get a second battery and experiment with pushing the motor's power output to see how much current can run through before it gets too hot. According to the manufacturer, it should be able to take boost currents of 600 amps just fine, but pushing this further is the right thing to do. At the peak power RPM of the electric motor, 48V across the motor poles at 600 amps means 28.8 kW! That's 38 horsepower! And we're just looking at what it is tested to do for two minutes straight...
A detailed PDF that outlines the manual we will write for documenting this go-kart can be found on this page. Additionally, software that I write or CAD models, etc can also be found under this directory, in case you ever want to create something like this on your own...
The name of "The Kart" comes from my teammates and myself referring to it as such, but it is a pretty good description, as this name will probably end up quite infamous in the department.
