Design Incubation Centre - Projects

NUS KRUCE Eco-Car

KRUCE (Kent Ridge Urban Concept Ecocar) is the second car conceptualised, designed and built by the NUS School of Design and Environment’s Design Incubation Centre (DIC) together with the Department of Mechanical Engineering team for the annual Shell Eco-marathon competition 2009 held in Europe. The competition challenge was to design a compact single-seater that can travel the farthest distance on the least amount of fuel. To achieve this, the Centre’s industrial design team focused design developments in improving two key areas: performance-derived form and accessibility.

Form follows performance. This year, the initial conception is the formal metaphor of a cell – a fluid, continuous body with minimal protrusions. The top of the vehicle is formed by the windscreen-roof surface that flows seamlessly from the front to the rear. The side mirrors, distinctly absent, are built into the interior to reduce turbulent side flows. The overall design is analyzed, studied and re-iterated to obtain a final form that gives superior aerodynamic and fuel efficiency compared to the predecessor, ECO-1, while creating a fresh aesthetic appeal.

The other key driver of the design is accessibility. Bearing in mind the need to carry out maintenance, performance tweaking and troubleshooting on KRUCE on a regular basis, KRUCE is designed with a ‘plug and play engine’, a tray-mounted fuel-cell system in the lower-rear compartment of the car. It can be easily drawn out, disconnected from the car body and worked on separately, or replaced. Other components, such as the steering mechanism, can be accessed separately by removable panels without the need to disassemble the entire bodywork.

The team took more than 1000 hours to complete the entire design process from idea to realization of the concept car. KRUCE completed the Shell Eco-Marathon race and achieved an impressive result of 484km on a single litre of fuel.