Last year I was lucky to beeing a team member of the new formula student team of my university. The first picture show the whole team (with me at the far left, and the Chief engineer sitting in the car) at FSUK Silverstone, summer of 2012. The team name is Revolve NTNU, and I have mainly been working with development of parts for the suspension system. The car is powered by a Suzuki GSX600R engine, and even with a 20mm inlet resitricor (rules) it is very fast! This spring and summer, we have been working many hours to get the car done. During the fall of last year we have mainly been designing and simulating the car in Siemens NX. Here are some early build photos from the building that started this spring. The frame and wishbones are made of tubular steel, and TIG welded together.
The next section of pictures shows some of my my work. Both the steering rack and the pedal box was bought from per. My task was to make shure everything at the front would fit togeter and work as intended. Even this is quite hard, as many design rules has to be satisfied. For convenience and demand, the pedal box was made adjustable. I designed a frame and some rails that could allow for this.
Here are some pictures on the track (Lånkebanen) where we tested the car. We tested the car several times, and fixed errors that occured. There is always some unexpected thing that goes wrong.
Here you can see one of broken the axle and wheel hub that we bough off shelf from an company designing such parts for various racecar applications. We chosed to buy these parts to save some time, and due to the fact that they were pretty lightweight. The poor quality of these parts were confirmed when other teams reported failures with the same parts. In the end we machined new parts from solid steel, and hoped that the rest would hold.
After many hours of testing, we finally had a car worth competing with. The next pictures show the nice and polished car at Silverstone UK. Our car clocked in at 17. place overall, and we also won the “Best newcomer at silverstone 2012” price. I never seen the team this happy, and we all deserved that! The response from other teams was also very positive, and even 10 year old teams was jalous on the finish and quality of our car. We also got approved by one of the main judges, Pat Clarke!
Here are some other pictures from the building process, including a CAD model. We also used alot of FEM analysis to test various parts. A slowmotion video of the car taking off can be found here in the youtube link.
Everybody lerned alot from this project, and I will even participate in building the 2013 car. From what I learned this year, I have many ideas on what can be made better. At Silverstone, people from other and more experienced teams was also happy to share some of their experience. I was also allowed to take pictures of their cars for inspiration! Some of the cars is really a piece of art!
Ivar A. blog 