Husker engineers earn grant to protect military bases against EV-based attacks
DOD PROJECT TO ADDRESS SPECIFIC THREATS POSED BY ELECTRIC VEHICLES
https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/husker-engineers-earn-grant-to-protect-military-bases-against-ev-based/With the aid of $3.6 million in funding from the U.S. Army’s Engineer Research and Development Center, research teams at Nebraska and Auburn University are working to safeguard the entry points of military bases against the specific threats posed by hostile-driven EVs.
“EVs are a different kind of an animal compared to gasoline vehicles,” said Stolle, assistant director of the Nebraska-housed Midwest Roadside Safety Facility and a research assistant professor of mechanical and materials engineering.
For starters, an EV battery so outweighs the engine of a gas-powered vehicle that the EV itself will often carry hundreds or even thousands of extra pounds in total. An EV carries that weight differently, too, with a center of gravity lower than its conventional counterpart. Despite the added heft, an electric motor also produces torque almost immediately after foot meets pedal, lending it a zero-to-60 acceleration that puts most internal combustion engines to shame.
The Nebraska team will be accounting for each of those factors, plus others, in refining barriers that ring the perimeters of U.S. military bases and protect the gated checkpoints used by friendly vehicles. Stolle said those passive barriers — whose designs can range from guardrails to post-like bollards — must be engineered to withstand high-speed ramming from EVs, which make up a growing percentage of the world’s automotive fleet.
“While they have many similarities to traditional vehicle counterparts, they’re not the same, and they will change the way that we design roadside hardware,” said Stolle, whose Nebraska team will receive $2.2 million of the funding over four years. “And it is beneficial for all of us to be prepared for a transition of any volume of our vehicle fleet toward electrification, because it means that we’re going to have to design to accommodate a broader swath of possibilities.
“The current study is a bedrock establishment of all the parameters necessary to ensure that (military) bases are able to handle vehicles of all types, whether gasoline or electric or even new technologies which have yet to be created.”
To devise and test their designs, the team — which includes Ronald Faller, research professor and director of the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility; Joshua Steelman, associate professor; and others — will employ a combination of the digital and the tangible. The former will include the most sophisticated modeling and simulations of classical mechanics on the planet. Some of those in-house computer simulations can model general vehicular dynamics, especially the ways that the forces acting on any one component will influence the behavior of another.
The engineers are also receiving support from Ansys, whose software can simulate the energy transfer of a collision by effectively isolating certain variables, then integrating the results into larger models on a millisecond-by-millisecond basis. Another donation, from Caresoft Global, will provide the team with comprehensive modeling specific to EVs.
