Version 1
: Received: 22 October 2018 / Approved: 23 October 2018 / Online: 23 October 2018 (03:42:42 CEST)
How to cite:
Baldissera, P.; Delprete, C. Learning Transportation Sustainability through Human Powered Vehicle Design - A Ten-Year Experience at Politecnico di Torino. Preprints2018, 2018100513. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201810.0513.v1
Baldissera, P.; Delprete, C. Learning Transportation Sustainability through Human Powered Vehicle Design - A Ten-Year Experience at Politecnico di Torino. Preprints 2018, 2018100513. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201810.0513.v1
Baldissera, P.; Delprete, C. Learning Transportation Sustainability through Human Powered Vehicle Design - A Ten-Year Experience at Politecnico di Torino. Preprints2018, 2018100513. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201810.0513.v1
APA Style
Baldissera, P., & Delprete, C. (2018). Learning Transportation Sustainability through Human Powered Vehicle Design - A Ten-Year Experience at Politecnico di Torino. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201810.0513.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Baldissera, P. and Cristiana Delprete. 2018 "Learning Transportation Sustainability through Human Powered Vehicle Design - A Ten-Year Experience at Politecnico di Torino" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201810.0513.v1
Abstract
In this work, the decennial experience of Policumbent student team at Politecnico di Torino is summarized by focusing on the acquired knowledge in design of Human Powered Vehicles (HPVs) and on soft skills developed by both students and staff. Policumbent was funded by the authors at the end of 2008 in order to gather engineering students interested in design and construction of HPVs. In the last decade, the team has grown from 10 up to 50 students enrolled per year, exploring a range of HPV design for sports and mobility. Even when focusing on sport vehicles and extreme HPVs for speed record, such kind of projects allows students to familiarize with important concepts related to sustainable mobility: the amount of resistive forces and dissipated power, the role of vehicle weight and the impact of acceleration on the overall energetic balance as far as fundamental concepts about energy consumption, efficiency and emissions of the ``human engine'' in comparison with other kind of engines. By touching with hands such topics in the framework of a ``human-centred'' design project, the students have opportunity to develop awareness about the impact of design choices on sustainability of any kind of vehicle for transportation. Also, the paper retraces the team evolution path by focusing on a thorough analysis of what factors contributed to the success of this project.
Keywords
project based learning; human powered vehicles; sustainable transportation design
Subject
Engineering, Control and Systems Engineering
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
