Category: Formula SAE

Anteater Racing Returns to Campus with Safety in Mind, Registers for 2021 Knowledge Events

Noah Stein on
After seven months, the doors are open for Anteater Racing at the UCI Vehicle Performance Engineering Lab. (“Vandal” shown behind the doors.)

We are back! Anteater Racing, upon receiving permission from the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine, resumed on-campus work on its SAE Collegiate Design Series competition vehicles with COVID-19 safety precautions. All three projects, Anteater Formula, Baja and Electric Racing, are currently manufacturing their vehicles at the Vehicle Performance Engineering Lab in anticipation for the 2021 Formula SAE and Baja SAE competitions. In addition, all three projects have successfully registered for their vehicle class’ Knowledge Events.

“Anteater Formula Racing is super excited to hear the good news that the team was granted access to the UCI School of Engineering Senior Design Project workspaces,” said Daniel Martinez, AFR Assistant Project Manager, Project Logistics. “Thank you to the Henry Samueli School of Engineering administrative staff and Professors Georgiou and McCarthy for helping us in this endeavor!”

Precautions include mandatory face coverings, frequent lab cleanings with disinfectants, reduced workspace personnel capacity, an online workspace booking procedure, and an online symptom check-in prior to arrival at facilities. Anteater Racing’s Project Members are only using spaces for essential manufacturing tasks, and they are continuing to hold meetings and perform all non-manufacturing tasks remotely. Members are also informed that they may opt out of on-campus tasks at any time.

Each project will spend Fall Quarter, October to mid-December, manufacturing their vehicles for the 2021 competitions. Anteater Electric Racing and Anteater Baja Racing both will construct new vehicles with inspiration and improvements from the 2019-20 season, titled “Ampeater II” and “Vandal II,” respectively. Anteater Formula Racing will finish “Jinx” as a two-year car with design upgrades developed during the COVID-19 manufacturing freeze.

With the pandemic, the SAE Collegiate Design Series announced changes to the event registration process for 2021. First, all teams in Formula SAE and Baja SAE register first for their Knowledge Events, which include the Design Event, Cost Event and Business Event/Sales Presentation, all of which will be held online. Once teams secure a spot, they will have the option to register again for the Validation Events, which include all of the trademark Dynamic events: Acceleration, Skidpad, Autocross, Endurance and Efficiency for Formula SAE and Acceleration, Hill Climb, Land Maneuverability, Suspension, and Endurance for Baja SAE. All three projects have successfully registered for their Knowledge Events, and all intend to register for Validation Events in November.

#151 – Anteater Baja Racing
#231 – Anteater Electric Racing
#034 – Anteater Formula Racing

Words & Photo by Noah Stein

Anteater Racing Goes Virtual For This Year’s SAE CDS Competitions

Noah Stein on

In March, with 3 months to go before Formula SAE California and 1 month before Baja SAE Arizona, the organizers of the SAE Collegiate Design Series competitions called off the in-person “dynamic” events due to the dangers presented by COVID-19.

However, the presentation-based “static” events are set to take place beginning this week via video conferencing, and Anteater Racing’s engineers are preparing to give these modified competitions their best while also focusing on redesigning their vehicles.

“We have been practicing since the beginning of this quarter for the design presentation and since last quarter for the sales presentation,” says Anteater Baja Racing Chief Engineer Joseph Castro. 

The design presentation involves the teams’ lead engineers, who each present their areas of focus throughout the year to volunteer judges from the engineering industry. Normally, each team’s 2020 vehicle would join them in this event as part of the presentation.

“Anteater Electric Racing, like the other two teams, has split into two groups, a competition team and a design team,” adds AER Project Manager Janet Sepulveda. “We’re preparing for the Business and Sales Presentations by giving weekly presentations to our advisors and fellow team members. Their feedback helps us improve our presentations towards what the judges are looking for.”

“The Business and Sales presentations involve responses to business-related scenarios, which encourage engineers to think critically about the management aspects of the engineering industry,” Anteater Formula Racing Team Manager Noah Stein explains. “For FSAE‘s Presentation this year, we have to present an action plan that responds to a corporate-level decision to cut 90% of our Research and Development budget. And for the Cost event, we are proposing a cost reduction of our fuel system.”

“Baja’s Sales Presentation this year requires us to create a manufacturing company seeking investors for a production rate of 4,000 vehicles a year,” Castro adds.

Meanwhile, all 3 teams have continued their development in anticipation of the full competitions’ return in 2021. Electric and Baja are developing entirely new cars, while Formula is developing upgrades as part of a two-year cycle.

Baja’s major changes for the recently-announced Vandal Mk II come in response to new regulations allowing 4-wheel drive.

Castro: “Our biggest redesign comes from the new 4×4 feature, which has posed interesting new design changes in system integration and vehicle packaging. This has added new components and thus more weight. However, every subsystem (brakes, chassis, powertrain and suspension & steering) has been updated to accommodate the added powertrain system while also improving our reliability and maneuverability.”

Electric’s Ampeater Mk II will make the team much more competitive with performance upgrades:

Sepulveda: “We are focusing heavily on a full Aerodynamic package, the first ever for the Electric team, on integrating a data acquisition system that records speed, acceleration, temperature and GPS data, and modifying our steering to use full Ackermann steering.

Formula’s Jinx will also see significant improvements on its original design:

Stein: “While we’re unable to manufacture due to the shutdown, everyone is fully-focused on 10 new component designs that we can manufacture as soon as possible, such as a new intake plenum, exhaust rerouting, converting to a semi-monocoque chassis, paddle shifting, and electronic throttle control.”

Both the Virtual competitions and the push towards new designs mean that Spring Quarter, even in these circumstances, is still an opportunity for innovation for Anteater Racing.

 

February Update from Anteater Formula Racing

Noah Stein on

Anteater Formula Racing’s engineers have been hard at work getting our car, Jinx, built and running. Halfway into UCI’s Winter Quarter, we have some awesome updates to share from four of our sub-teams:

Aerodynamics: We’re manufacturing our airfoils for the front and rear wings. This involves cutting large foam molds via computer numerical control (CNC) which precisely cuts the foam into the perfect shape. Then, we sand and paint the molds with special paint so that, when we form the wing out of carbon fiber, it will come off the mold easily and have a nice, smooth surface finish. We’re also using 3D printing to make our smaller components. To do this, we convert our SolidWorks model to a 3D print-compatible form and 3D-print it overnight. Soon, we’ll end up with a strong, lightweight wing that will give us an edge at FSAE California.

Brakes: All brake components have been purchased and our rotors are being machined to our specifications. We’ll assemble and test the entire brake system in the upcoming week!

Chassis: Over winter break, we tack-welded the chassis. Tack welds are small welds that keep the tubes in place so that they can be fully welded without the risk of the tubes moving. This process included making sure the tubes were “jigged up” in the right position. We used a machined floor jig set up over a top-down printout of the chassis and squares to ensure each tube was in the correct spot before being tacked. Additionally, the tubes must be held in place while the welds cool to prevent warping, or natural “pulling” and moving of the tubes. In January, we fully welded the front and middle sections of the chassis. Following the completion of the oil pan, the engine can be mocked up and lowered into the chassis, where the engine mounts will be attached to the engine and welded to the chassis. The remaining rear section can then be welded and the chassis will be complete! See our chassis on its jig below:

Engine Development: We’re currently manufacturing all of the components needed to get Jinx’s engine running! We finished manufacturing our entire exhaust system and are currently mounting it to the chassis. We’re also manufacturing a custom oil pickup and oil pan in order to mount the engine at a height that will give the car a low center of gravity to make the vehicle nimble. Once that’s completed, we’ll work with Chassis to mount the engine itself as they mentioned in their update. Further, the radiator shroud that houses the fan and encompasses the radiator has been manufactured and is being mounted to the radiator. We’re hard at work bringing our designs into the real world so Jinx can be the most competitive FSAE car AFR has ever produced!

Stay tuned for our next update featuring our Driveline, Electronics, Human Interface and Suspension sub-teams!

Selecting a Final Drive Ratio for AFR’s Jinx (and Why It’s Critical to Get Right)

Noah Stein on

by Matt McMurry

The Driveline Sub-system handles power delivery from the engine to the rear wheels and must design components that deliver power as quickly as possible. Acceleration performance is such a critical part of our competition that each decision can mean gaining or losing several places in the overall result.

There are many factors that influence a car’s maximum acceleration, but one of the main factors is the series of gear ratios in the transmission between the engine and the rear wheels. The transmission multiplies the engine output torque by the overall gear ratio and divides the engine rotational speed by the same amount. Increasing the overall gear ratio (by changing the primary, gear, or final drive ratios) will increase the amount of torque at the rear wheels, which will generally increase the acceleration of the car. For our team, it is too resource-intensive to change the primary or gear ratios, so we will change the final drive ratio (FDR) to meet our torque needs.

If a higher FDR will increase acceleration, why not just pick the highest ratio that will fit in the car? There are two reasons:

  1. The tires only have enough grip to transmit a certain amount of torque. If you exceed that torque value, you will begin to spin the tires, which prevents acceleration and makes the car difficult to drive.
  2. A higher FDR means the driver will have to shift gears more often. Shifting gears takes a finite amount of time (usually between 0.1 and 0.5 seconds), and the car does not accelerate during this period. This sounds like an insignificant amount of time, but 0.5 seconds of shifting is 12% of the entire Acceleration Event at competition. 

Therefore a compromise must be made between shifting time, drivability, and final drive ratio in order to maximize acceleration.

 

To find the best compromise for our car we developed a discrete-time simulation of the car accelerating. The simulation takes into account things like drag and weight transfer and uses a tire model based on empirical data from the FSAE Tire Test Consortium as well as engine data from dynamometer testing. The shift time and FDR were varied and the Acceleration Event time was recorded for each combination. The results of the parameter sweep can be seen below:

A clear minimum acceleration time for a particular shift time can be seen in Figure 2. This minimum is increasingly obvious for longer shift times. The results are comparable to those found in similar research by Ping (1).  

Previous testing has shown our average upshift time to be 0.25 seconds. For this shift time, the optimum FDR is 4.2. This will be the starting point for the car’s FDR. We plan to verify our simulations and fine tune the FDR through on-track testing. 

This is the kind of advanced analysis that Anteater Formula Racing engineers do every day and is why UCI’s Formula SAE program is so important to our engineering education. We get to solve real engineering problems and follow them through the entire engineering process from analysis and design through to manufacturing and testing. 

Matt McMurry is a Senior aerospace engineer and the Chief Engineer for Anteater Formula Racing. He is also the Lead Engineer for the Driveline sub-team, which includes Ryan Gagarin, Joseph Zhang and Patrick Hall.

Keeping it Cool: AFR’s Cooling System Upgrades for ’20

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by Dillon Smith

The Engine Development team at Anteater Formula Racing is hard at work on developing cooling upgrades for this year’s car.

The Formula SAE competition demands the best from every system, but one of the biggest challenges is keeping the engine cool during the Endurance event.

This year, Wraith suffered from a seized engine during Endurance at Lincoln. This was due in part to the engine overheating during competition. The maximum safe operating temperature for our engine is 200 degrees Fahrenheit, but data taken from the ECU after the breakdown showed that coolant temps reached over 250 degrees after sitting for several minutes during the mandatory driver change, which starved the radiator of cool air.

The engine team has been running tests at UCI’s Vehicle Performance Engineering Lab to determine the specific cause of failure since the summer and are developing upgrades to keep Jinx cool. By measuring the water flow rates through the running engine at various RPMs and measuring the temperature drop from the radiator inlet and outlet, we’ve been able to measure Wraith’s overall cooling ability. Our calculations show that the previous design is insufficient for our needs, so we’re undergoing a full redesign of the cooling system to meet our current requirements. So far this year, our focus has been on reliability so that we can push the car harder and perform better in competition with less issues.

Figure 1  AFR’s Engine Development Sub-team runs tests on last year’s cooling system.
Want to support our developments and our 2020 car? Consider donating to our ZotFunder campaign here, running through 12/1/19.

How a standard water-cooled system works:

As the engine runs, it generates large amounts of heat.  In order to keep the engine temperature at 200 degrees, the excess heat is absorbed using a water-cooling system that pumps cool water through the engine block. The hot water is then passed through a thermostat which opens once the temperature of the water reaches 190 degrees. To avoid cavitation, or the creation of low-pressure pockets that interrupt water flow, the hot water is then sent to a swirl pot, which allows any steam in the system to condense back into liquid. This condensed hot water is then sent through the radiator, where heat is removed through convection, and then is sent back into the engine using a pump.

Figure 2 Block diagram for the Jinx cooling system.

The radiator performs most of our cooling by passing the engine coolant through an exposed fin setup that allows the passing air to absorb heat from the system. Increasing the temperature drop across the radiator allows our engine to run cooler and avoid overheating.

To do this:

  1. We’ll install a larger radiator as well as more powerful cooling fans to improve the airflow to the coolant.
  2. We’ll install an upgraded water pump to increase coolant mass flow through the system.
  3. We’re working with our Aerodynamics team to design a custom sidepod to maximize the amount of air that is directed to our radiator (Figure 3).

Figure 3 CAD design of Jinx cooling system.

We expect to have Jinx up and running in early 2020, stay tuned!

Dillon Smith is a fourth-year mechanical engineer on AFR’s Engine Development sub-team, which is led by Tristan Cortez and also includes Mohammed Azeem, Daniel Martinez, Mason Socha, Sangghara Kusumo, Edward Han and Dustin Ngo.