Moto Manipal team wins National Online E-Bike Design contest

Students from Moto Manipal, the official electric bike team of Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), have secured first place in the National Online E-Bike Design Competition, Season-2, organised by the Fraternity of Mechanical and Automotive Engineers (FMAE).

The team members said that the final presentation was held recently for the competition. In fact, the team had participated in the National Online E-Bike Design Competition, Season-1, and had emerged champions last year too.

The team from Manipal Institute of Technology has been working for the competition for the last five months. “For the National Online E-Bike Design challenge Season-2, we were made to design an electric bike powered by a 2 kW brushless DC Motor using various CAD and CAE softwares for modelling and analysis. Complete research and development was done by the team, including complete reports on different components used in the bike, and the calculation behind it,” said Supreet Kulkarni, a team member.

About the challenges, team manager Arav Gupta said, “since there was no physical contact with each another, communication was key in designing the model.The team made it a point to interact daily for a few hours to ensure that we made progress in the project.”

“We had successfully designed and manufactured our first commercial electric Bike - "MM01", which we presented at the Asian E-Bike Challenge, 2019. The manufacturing of our second bike -- "MM02" was delayed due to the pandemic. However, everything is ready and all preparations have been made for the manufacturing to start as soon as we get a green signal from the college to work at our workshop once normalcy prevails in the MIT campus. This bike is being designed to participate in the Moto Student International Competition to be held in Spain in 2022,” said Rishabh Suri, team leader.

What makes the win really special is the team coming together as one even during these testing times which bears testimony to the fact that team work helps in the success.

The team hopes to participate in the upcoming competition, MotoStudent Electric - India to be held at Kari Motorspeedway later this year if the situation permits.