For our SOTA (State Of The Art) search, we visited web sites concerning the topics that we felt would be pertinent to this design project.
We narrowed our brainstorming for the SOTA down to three main questions:
What patents
exist for a battery containment system?
What types of
crash analysis tests can/should be performed on the battery containment
system?
Can we find
information about existing electric vehicles (Trucks)?
Having decided on what topics needed to be addressed first, we then did a patent search to see what could and could not be incorporated into our design. This particular task required a significant amount of time to complete.
Realizing that we were going to need to perform a series of simulated crash tests, we visited the National Crash Analysis Center to obtain general guidelines for this process. At this site we found that FEA (Finite Element Analysis) is primarily used in simulating "real-life" crashes.
Finally, we needed to know what research has been done on electric cars and trucks. Since this topic is so broad, we needed to narrow our search down to vehicles that were converted from gasoline powered to electric... particularly trucks.
Below are a few sites that aided
us in achieving our goal:
http://www.gwuva.gwu.edu/ncac (Currently Down)
home.pacbell.net/hutectro.electrks.htm