This report aims to improve the range and lifetime of an electric scooter, primarily by minimizing the scooter’s mass. The purpose of this is to improve London’s electric scooter transport system, which potentially offers a more sustainable alternative to current methods of transport, such as cars or the London Underground.
To ensure that the scooter remains safe to operate, minimum factors of safety and natural frequency requirements have been imposed, with these constraints also acting to help optimise the effective lifetime of the scooter. The scooter was first analysed at a system level, before being decomposed into four key subsystems: handlebar, foot deck, wheels, and brake disks, each using mass as the objective function.
These subsystems were initially reliant on a few interdependencies, but for simplicity, these were then fixed as parameters. After optimisation was conducted, the mass of each respective subsystem totaled: 0.94 kg, 5.18 kg, 1.86 kg (*2), and 25.3g (*2). Together with the standard 1.5 kg battery, this yielded an overall system mass of 11.39 kg, seeing a 19.78 % improvement over the Xiaomi Pro 2, a popular electric scooter available on the market today.
