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2010 SAE Competition Design
Stay tuned for updates! 2009 SAE Competition Design The 2009 car was again designed completely new for the competition. We saw no need to change from the body-on-frame construction but we did design it differently. The 2009 car incorporated the physical rail design from the 2008 car as well as the truss frame design from the 2006/2007 chassis. We also rigidly attached the bottom section of the body. This allowed us to mount switches and components to the body since the bottom section would never be removed. Overall we were very pleased with the body and frame construction, and we felt that it was our best production so far. For the engine, we made our first attempt at the overhead cam design, using primarily Honda 50cc components. The bottom end remained stock Briggs components and to join the two we designed a connecting rod and had it CNC machined by our Formula SAE team. With the exception of the oil dipper (see our web log page) we were very happy with the engine. Unfortunately, we lack an adequate dyno to tune such an engine efficiently. We did our best with it, but there is definitely much more that can be done with a proper dyno setup. We look to do a significant amount of testing on the 2009 engine this fall to work on development for the 2010 engine setup. 2008 SAE Competition Design The 2008 car was designed completely new for this competition. We again used a body-on-frame design, but we changed the way the frame itself was designed. Using the pluses of the previous year and improving on the minus we decided to run a carbon fiber boxed frame design. To improve rigidity in the front and the rear aluminum subframes were used. This chassis design resulted in a very effective platform. Previous problems resulting from the more flexible chassis such as throwing chains due to minor frame flex were non-existent. For the 2008 engine we used a sleeved down Briggs and Stratton 3.5, using parts from a 2.4 Briggs and Stratton engine. Unfortunately for the competition we did not have enough time to work out a higher compression design. We were only running around 8.0:1 compression where would have liked to have been much higher. This definitely hurt our mileage performance. Overall these changes improved our previous year’s mileage score by over 200 mpg. 2007 SAE Competition Design The 2007 car was the same body-on-frame design as the 2006 car. The main difference for 2007 was the introduction of electronic fuel injection. The ability to fine tune the fuel map with fuel injection netted an additional 500 mpg over the previous year. 2006 SAE Competition Design The 2006 car was a body-on-frame design that incorporated a fully carbon fiber tube chassis with a carbon and fiberglass body. The engine used was a 3.5 hp Briggs and Stratton engine. We equipped the engine with an OHV head but did not use fuel injection. This car proved to be a solid vehicle in most aspects, but the lack of fuel injection hurt the overall performance. |