Author: vfrnzyan

With the start of winter quarter the electric racing team has switched its focus from the electrical systems to the mechanical systems. Thor will be using a double wishbone suspension since that allows us to maintain a reasonable camber while the wheels travel up and down. So far the suspension team has finished preliminary designs for all four uprights and their respective control arms.

The suspension is designed so that the car will meet FSAE rules by having a ground clearance of 2 inches with a travel of 1.25 inches vertically. Additionally, since the car will be approximately 800 pounds with a driver, it is important to have suspension that is robust and strong.

The next step will be designing the push rods and doing a finite elements analysis to confirm the uprights are strong enough. A completed suspension design should be finished by the end of week five and be completely built and installed on the frame by the end of the winter quarter.

 

Hello Anteater Racing Fans! As the years go on our FSAE, FSAE Electric, and SAE Baja become faster, lighter, and more efficient. This years vehicles are no exception; as we push towards engineering these cars to compete in the FSAE and SAE Baja competitions. These vehicles would not be possible without contributions from UC Irvine and our beloved Sponsors. Now, you have the chance to help push our project forward and aid us in engineering these Racecars! Anteater Racing has created a crowd funding site in order to help raise funds for our team. Donations of all sizes are appreciated and will help us create these works of engineering. Thank you for your contributions to our team!

https://zotfunder.give.uci.edu/project/3710

Hello there, we are kicking this year out right so far. Instead of waiting until last minute, after all the parts have been manufactured, we started our wooden chassis mock-up this past week. The main goals of making a mock-up is to ensure that the design we created actually work out in the physical world and determine the best position of certain parts such as the accelerator pedal, brakes, and steering wheel. In the figures above, you can see several parts of our vehicle positioned in areas we believe is the best orientation for the drivers.

We salvaged most of the parts from our last year’s vehicle, Electra, to get the rough estimates. Expect the battery box, that we made out of cardboard from this year’s design. One of the main issues on Electra was the positioning and weight of the battery box. However, this year Thor will be a different story. We have changed the placement and combined the batteries into one section. We decided on this design because it adds another level of safety by not having our drivers jump over battery boxes and even lowering the weight significantly by not using as much material.

This year, I know we are more prepared because we are taking what we learned from Electra and putting it into every aspect of Thor. Thank you for your time and happy Thor’sday.

-Alanna Ho

The past few weeks, the team had been working on wiring the electrical systems for racecar, “Thor”. This had been a major repeated issue for many years, and we hope to solve our issues with our car’s electrical systems this year.

We had also drew the wiring diagram for the low voltage box. In previous years, a graduated graduate student built an electric racecar called Epsilon. Though it was only for a project, and therefore not built with the FSAE regulations in mind, it still serves as a good example for us to base Thor’s electrical system off of. One of them was the driver’s display. This tells us the car’s speed and voltage in the battery. We have planned for Thor to have an identical system to simplify things.

Our battery boxes are also in development, though only existing as Solidworks constructs at the moment. We have planned on constructing them out of steel, and welding the corners together. Last year, they were two separate boxes, and fitted together with rivets. The problem was that this was extremely time consuming, and also horrendously heavy. By only using one box, we simplify construction, and also allowing us to store the batteries in the back. This should hopefully shorten the car a bit, though center of gravity may still be an issue. Welding is also a lot quicker that using a few hundred rivets. These boxes need to withstand a lot of force, up to 40Gs in some places.

These, of course, are going to be used to power our electric motors, which have been supposedly taken from a golf cart. We geared it down slightly, in order to provide more torque at the beginning at the cost of limiting our top speed. However, we have observed from last year that we are unlikely to reach that high of a speed anyways.

Huh, I ramble a lot when I get going. Good night everybody.

-Ethan “Appletank” Cheng.