NAU Motor Systems

Mission Statement

Our mission is to help lower the cost of electric car conversions by designing a low cost, high efficient motor controller utilizing today's modern technology.

Project Overview

We have been tasked to design a new motor controller for electric vehicles as part of our senior design capstone class [EE 486] at Northern Arizona University. This project started spring semester 2009 for our junior design class [EE386] where we began our preliminary research on motor controls. Our research culminated into a small prototype circuit that drove a 12 Volt DC motor running at a nominal current of 33 milliamps. For the 2009- 2010 school year, we hope to continue our success and plan to build a much larger scale version of our prototype. Our new motor controller will power a DC brush motor at 160 volts and over 500 amps. In order to accurately test our motor controller on-road conditions, we will be converting a vehicle to electric. Our test vehicle is a 1994 Land Rover, Range Rover Classic. It will give us the feedback needed to build a reliable and safe product.

Project Timeline

We've accepted a fairly large project, as such we've been working hard to meet our deadlines and complete all of the requirements we've promised to our sponsors. We've set a project completion date in April where we will hand Electric Blue Motors a completed product (including all schematics, CAD drawings, testing data/results, enclosure and packaging information, assembly instructions, and yes, even a product manual). With this in mind, electric vehicles enthusiasts should expect the ability to purchase a cheaper motor controller in late May, early June. For a more detailed timeline, click here, or take a look at our Downloads page.