Waterford CAD Firm Sponsors Virginia Tech's EcoCar
Waterford Township-based Aurora CAD Training and Development Corp. announced that it has signed a sponsorship deal with Virginia Tech for CAD training on the EcoCar program.
The EcoCar 2 program, established by the U.S. Department of Energy and General Motors, is a three-year collegiate engineering competition and the only program of its kind. The Hybrid Electric Vehicle Team of Virginia Tech (www.me.vt.edu/hevt) is comprised of 24 senior mechanical engineering students and is an active participant in this competition.
The first year of the EcoCar2 competition is all about hybrid architecture selection, component integration, and controller development all completely in simulation. GM will provide each team with a detailed virtual CAD model of the design vehicle which will allow the teams to validate architecture selection by creating individual component models and installing them into the virtual model.
Aurora CAD Training and Development (www.acadtd.com), the first local team sponsor, is providing Virginia Tech's HEVT with the training material for the Siemens Unigraphics NX7 CAD software. The NX7 software combined with the ACADTD training material gives HEVT the necessary components to validate all mechanical designs within the CAD models before attempting to complete them on the physical vehicle.
By partnering with Aurora CAD Training and Development, Virginia Tech's HEVT ensures that the models developed and judged at Year 1 competition will be of the highest quality and useful for the future students enrolled in HEVT during years 2 and 3 to follow.
HEVT is also finishing up working on a Crossover SUV nicknamed the VTREX as part of the EcoCAR Challenge (www.ecocarchallenge.org). The team's current design vehicle has the ability to drive more than 50 miles as a pure electric vehicle up to highway speeds, after which the vehicle uses E85 (ethanol) and a conventional engine and transmission acting as a range extending device for longer trips.
For more information, please visit: www.acadtd.com or email sales@acadtd.com.
