Another year has passed, also a second car had to be built for our FS team. This year I was mainly working on developing a new upright and hub system for the suspension system. The experience from last year is invaluable in the new design. Our goal is to reduce the weight and the number of parts, this will be done by combining parts that previously were joined by bolts or welding. Pushing limits was iour goal for this year, and we was able to make a car that would outperform our 2012 car KA Borealis R easily. The new car KA Aquilo is seen here in a photoshoot together with a plane.
More photos of our new car, even more polish was used this year compared to last year! The bling is really impressive!
As said, my task for this year was to design the upright-hub system for the suspension. This is the parts that hold the wheel to the car. The first set of pictures shows the upright part alone. Siemens NX was used both for CAD design and FEM testing, the parts itself was CNC-machined by Devotek in Kongsberg.
The idea was to introduce an I-Beam design for both stiffness and lightweight.
As mentioned, we used alot of FEM analysis, we even tested each section of the part by itself. By doing so, it is easier to understand how each part will contribute to the total stiffness.
Another challenge we had this year was the welding of the frame. We used thinner and lighter tubes that were still within rules, but we could only have them in stainless steel quility. We also decided to TIG weld the frame ourselves, it was not an easy task due to the difficult material. I had been welding alot on last years car, and did also weld alot on this car. We had designed some fixture to make shure the frame was up to spec.
Another feature designed by the girl working in the engine group was some various length intake runners. The whole thing had to be inside the airbox, agin due to rules (there are alot of them) 3D printing was used for the aluminium intake runners and various other parts.
Some other pictures from the construction process. This year we built many more of the parts ourselves and very few of them broke, this is always a good thing!
This year we were also quite successful at Silverstone, clocking in at 16. position. We also won the price for most innovative electronic system with our CAN-bus system. The results we got is quite a acheivement considering all the 130 teams that participate. Many of them have been participating for many years!
A little update! with my upright design I won an iPod CAD design competition held by Siemens NX:
Ivar A. blog 