Thor Week 6 Update

For this week, we are still focusing on electrical system design as suggested by the professor. I have been working on the battery box sub-team. For those that who do not know, the battery box is where we are going to keep the high and low voltage system within the racecar. The battery box must meet many requirements, such as withstanding 40g from all directions and certain insulation and minimum steel thickness. Pretty much they want to make sure that if the racecar gets into a crash or something crazy, that the batteries will not be thrown out or combust or kill the driver. I personally have been working on designing brackets that will allow us to mount the battery box to the chassis (actual mounting locations still undecided until we design the chassis). Designing the brackets may seems simple, but we must take into consideration many details and double check that it will satisfy the rule requirements. For this design process, we use the SolidWorks CAD program. We first build the CAD model and then we can run simulations to see if it will be able to withstand the requirements.

-Maritza Anaya

thor6