Benn
12-23-2009, 09:18 AM
Hi all, my undergraduate thesis was the design/manufacture of a composite monocoque chassis, pretty much as a solo effort with some help on the materials testing and a fair bit on the manufacturing side. Long story short, my team hasn't been functioning that well of late, so unfortunately or maybe fortunately the chassis will never hit the road. To give you some idea, I also pretty much built the teams 2009 chassis solo, as well as designing and manufacturing a large part of the suspension components (it kinda gets depressing when you work 40 hours a week on the car over winter break and no one else is in more then a handful of hours a week).
So instead, I've decided to share it with you all, hopefully some of you may get something out of it, and hopefully I will get some critique/comments/feedback from people who know better then me have done something similar, so that I get something out of it too.
End of the day, my final thesis report is nowhere near as complete as it could be from a F-SAE perspective but it was enough to get the marks I wanted, I could easily double or even triple the word count and I did consider adding a bit more before I posted this, but lazyness, work and life has gotten in the way, so here it is an early christmas present. I pretty much wrote it in 4 days so excuse me if it is fairly concise. To cover some shortcomings I'm sure will come up immediately in the design, yes I know more testing would have been better. And yes, the FEA package I used probably wasn't the best for the job, I did get HyperWorks towards the end of the project, but porting everything over despite how easy hyperworks is to use was something I never quite got around to, but it is something I plan to do when I get the time (working fulltime now). And yeah I know I didn't address structural equivalency at all. End of the day, I had to manage my workload on the project, and I'm happy with the end result as a 1st gen product.
Anyway, here it is uploaded to mediafire http://www.mediafire.com/?mfitnm3ulzm let me know if there is a better way of hosting it. Feel free to share.
Cheers,
Ben
p.s. The car would have sidepods too, but I decided it would be pointless to design them at this stage as they wouldn't be structural anyway. Also the seat would be a sandwich structure glued into the tub, but decided to leave it out to simplify things.
So instead, I've decided to share it with you all, hopefully some of you may get something out of it, and hopefully I will get some critique/comments/feedback from people who know better then me have done something similar, so that I get something out of it too.
End of the day, my final thesis report is nowhere near as complete as it could be from a F-SAE perspective but it was enough to get the marks I wanted, I could easily double or even triple the word count and I did consider adding a bit more before I posted this, but lazyness, work and life has gotten in the way, so here it is an early christmas present. I pretty much wrote it in 4 days so excuse me if it is fairly concise. To cover some shortcomings I'm sure will come up immediately in the design, yes I know more testing would have been better. And yes, the FEA package I used probably wasn't the best for the job, I did get HyperWorks towards the end of the project, but porting everything over despite how easy hyperworks is to use was something I never quite got around to, but it is something I plan to do when I get the time (working fulltime now). And yeah I know I didn't address structural equivalency at all. End of the day, I had to manage my workload on the project, and I'm happy with the end result as a 1st gen product.
Anyway, here it is uploaded to mediafire http://www.mediafire.com/?mfitnm3ulzm let me know if there is a better way of hosting it. Feel free to share.
Cheers,
Ben
p.s. The car would have sidepods too, but I decided it would be pointless to design them at this stage as they wouldn't be structural anyway. Also the seat would be a sandwich structure glued into the tub, but decided to leave it out to simplify things.