• Notes for students

• Notes for Design Judges

Suspension Geometry

• Controls Toe Angle Movement

• Controls Camber Gain

• Controls Ride Height Movement

• Good geometry gives the springs, dampers, and anti-roll bars more influence than the geometry itself

Many of the common issues with FSAE halfshafts stem from these problems:

• Extreme misalignment between differential and wheel hub

• Tripod housing depth too shallow or too deep on either or both ends

• Contaminants in grease
  

• Comparing and engineering for different materials

• Strength, stiffness, triangulation, load paths, gussets

• Suspension loading

• EV Accumulator mounts

• Engineer a strong battery lifespan

• EV Efficiency is as important as mass, downforce, drag, power, and mu.

• Create tools for drivers to manage energy

• Add regenerative braking later

In addition to a torsion test, local and whole-chassis FEA can show performance for different chassis designs during combined cornering, aero and bump loads, for drivetrain attachments during acceleration and braking, and for harness and other mounts during front impact.

• Set up business and school relationships.

• Recruit and organize a team.

• Write and raise a budget.

• THEN design and build the car.

In the time it takes to read this sentence, design finalists are capable of presenting data from the same day’s Autocross, along with analysis of which assumptions the data validates or invalidates, how it fits with all their other testing, and what the next steps are to continue improving the car and drivers. They do this for everything, all year.

Doing research, reverse engineering, setting design targets. Additional insight for teams thinking about making the EV transition.

They made a whole host of small changes that were almost imperceptible to the eye but aerodynamically significant. They also gave the car a nose-down rake by lowering the front suspension and raising the rear, both ever-so-slightly. All of the changes made the car significantly safer to drive at high speed. But the Ford Indigo was never going to be driven at high speeds as a show concept car – right?

To manage priorities, ask four questions about every design decision, in this order: 1. Is it legal or illegal? 2. How does the change affect reliability or repeatability? 3. How does the change affect overall vehicle performance over a lap? 4. What are the drivability effects?

The most common barrier between your team and your performance goals is reliability. These design best practices are intended to help you create strong, stiff, and light mechanical designs. Every design requires tradeoffs, and this list is not intended to be a set of absolute rules; but it will help you identify common design strategies to follow, pitfalls to avoid, and will inform your design decision making.

There was one closely held secret design condition. It was secret because management would not want us to ‘overdesign’ the V12. The truth is, with clever engineering, planning for significant power increases adds very little weight and cost if you know what you are doing and if it is done up front.

Engineering is about finding the Goldilocks Solution. Cost is not separate from engineering; indeed it must go hand in hand with it. Good engineering practice goes beyond the merely technical, and encompasses knowledge of customers, supply chain, society, environmental impact etc. 

There is amazing variability in human bodies. Generally, vehicles are designed to reach from the 5th to 95th percentile, including any gender differences. But determining the measurements to use is complicated. Different countries or regions may have different ranges, and the gene interactions for any individual result in many different percentiles depending on the measurement.

Instead of thinking that you have to fill up X number of pages for the design report, the mentality should be “how can we fit all of our knowledge and work into these pages?”

The approach to understand what makes an engine run well is to look at the opening and closing of each valve. But whatever you want the valves to do, they’re actually doing something else, because you always have: Deflection, Inertia, and Vibration.

Simply finding the combination that gives the fastest laptime is missing the point. The point is to understand the size of each effect, and how to engineer each effect to achieve the fastest laptime.

As you move through the design process, you start with insight, then gradually trade insight for accuracy.

Defining requirements, validating models, on-car tuning, and understanding the root cause of problems. The process of developing and troubleshooting a steering system.