2008 FSAE Year in Review

[GSXR05K]

Well, the network stations got me all sentimental...

Tell you favorite stories and Post your best pics from 2008!!!

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FSAE West: Autocross: 3rd, Design: 4th, Sales: 3rd, Skidpad 5th.

Story of the year would have to be after West, the team went to Joe's Crab Shack for dinner. Afterwards, 6 of the team pile into a minivan to go home. Well our driver mistakenly had the minivan in reverse instead of drive. He proceded to floor the accelerator and backed over a huge concrete flower pot (part of curb). 2 spaces behind him is a COP! He flashes his lights and walks up to the driver. Everyone in the minivan is trying not to crack up.

Cop asks question in the way only a cop can do, "What happ'n back there?" It's too much, and everyone in the van breaks out laughing. So the cop asks our driver, "You been drinkin'?". Our driver responds,"No, but these guys have," pointing with a thumb backwards.

At this point, everyone is cracking up. So the cop says we better get out of the minivan and make sure everything is ok with the van. So a handful of inebriated Formula guys get out and stumble around the van looking for leaks, etc. Everyone laughing at how rediculous this looked. Nothing was wrong, everyone got back in, and the cop told our driver, "Have a nice day."

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[jrickert]

I'm surprised rental companies still rent vans to FSAE teams. We have had our share of van tomfoolery.

[TacoPete]

also SDSM&T your car is pretty sexy.. that is some beautiful work on the rear wing

[Mikey Antonakakis]

No offense to the other teams with aero, but that is one of the few FSAE cars with wings that looks good, and it looks REALLY good

[Grant Mahler]

Gorgeous car! I wish I had been able to make it to West to see your (and other) cars.



I also wish your driver was wearing a fire suit...

[The AFX Master]

Aren't those high rear wings on the other winged cars made to avoid disturbed air from the roll hoop???

How do you manage to mount that thing that low (And i agree about the look, great! http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif )

[Chris_S]

Originally posted by Pete Mech:
How about almost getting into two accidents within the first 2 hrs of a 51 hour cross country trip, note: we need to install an ARB bull bar to the suburban

... or possibly winning West after a French man told us we couldn't without sway bars

or also VIR

Claude by any chance ?
In Germany we were told by Steve Fox that he could pick the top 10 cars, he didn't pick our car. We finished 5th, very nearly 4th if it wasn't for a pesky cone !

2008 didn't start well, didn't finish at Silverstone due to a minor oil leak. Between Silverstone and Germany we dropped lap times by 2 seconds, gave us a lot of confidence in the car. The drivers loved the way it handled after the changes. 5th in Germany was a good end though, considering we'd never been before.
And then to finish it off, driving the car for a full day with no problems or failures.

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It was also good to see the hydrogen car competing and win. No more hyrdrogen this year, there were plans for a wankel engine running on hyrogen, but the Imeche put an end to that.

[exFSAE]

Hmm. Some of the same, some new.

Went to "Detroit" comp again (at MIS obviously), though this time as an alumni and volunteer. I miss the pace and the critical path of events but it sure was less stressful just being able to watch! Still knew most of the team. Couple other alums from 07 and 06 were around either for fun or volunteers.

Was very proud to see them put down some school-best times in accel and skidpad, and do very well in design.

Then afterward, got to drinking.. heavily.. with the team. And had to drive back in the morning, hungover, with my former co-captain in the passenger seat puking intermittently.

And then later in the year started getting the phone calls in the middle of the night about tire and suspension crap.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

[James Morris]

I guess Swansea Mets 08 story really started back in October of 2007 with extensive testing of our 07 car to find its strengths and weaknesses. With a core team of just 7 members we really had to take an analytical view of the individual events to seeing where we could make the biggest points impact. With this in mind we set out our overall goals for the 2008 which would shape our design decisions, and therefore the time and effort each area of the car would receive with respect to the potential performance gain.

Our overall goals for 2008 were to finish in the top 10 of all the dynamic events and be in the top 5 of the UK teams.

To do this we set out the following design decisions after our research,

• More kinematic camber compensation at the rear of the car to optimise the avons contact patch to compensate for tyre deflection during cornering.
• Continued use of the Avons due to all the data we’ve acquired over the years and setup knowledge.
• The car suspension was tuned to about the damping coefficients of the fox DHX5 and natural frequency front and rear of the vehicle. The suspension rockers geometry was then designed around the fox DHX5 critical damping for the natural frequency of our front and rear suspension systems.
• The steering racks position was set to be adjustable to allow a range of adjustment to the Ackerman
• After analysing other car performance at formula student 07, we noticed a trend among the top car towards the minimum wheel base that rules will allow, and with our 07 car wheel base 69 inches a large reduction was on the cards.
• On the engine side of the project we decided to stick to the trusty F4i. After analysing the results of the enduro/fuel eco and noticing how close the top ten were, we decided that a more economical engine would be an easier way of procuring points and therefore vital places during the event.
Producing a histogram of the average throttle position during the 07 endurance revealed some real truths about the way we should aim to map the engine.
With this in mind the engine would be mapped to max power only at full throttle, and at part throttle sights the engine would be ran very lean, and to complement this strategy the car would be ran on the higher octane E85 fuel to prevent detonation. (Although running the engine on E85 would cause all sorts of problems later)…
• And finally get the car in a state suitable for testing by May so an extensive program of driver training and car set up could be pursued.

With these goals set the designing, building and testing started.

The chassis design was similar to that of our 07 car to enable us to reuse the chassis jig of our 07 and there for save time, this was adapted to allow for the new suspension systems and a shorter wheel base by reducing the distance between the front and main hoops
The chassis design also incorporated lower sides to the cockpit to help with egress time, a problem with our previous design and the driver’s seat back was raised by 7 degrees to enable better visibility of the track.

On the engine side if things, the use of E85 required the introduction of E85 resistant fuel lines, rail, and a stainless steel fuel tank. Injector bed testing of the injectors to ensure that their duty cycle was large enough and that they resisted the corrosive effects of the ethanol.

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In an attempt to increase midrange torque the Honda F4i head was swapped out for a Honda FY head due to its smaller port diameter, when tested on the dyno the head perked the mid range without strangling the top end so we stuck with it from then on in.

The head was then subjected to a CFD and flow bench evaluation with small gains made by removing the seams and a light polishing, small gains were also made by adjusting the valve seat area, the area behind the valve guide and by sharpening the bridge between the 2 valves.

A CFD led design program was instigated for the restrictor, plenum and trumpets, with good gains being seen on the flow bench prototypes.
On the dyno however the priorities of the plenum design would change drastically. Due to the evaporative nature of the ethanol and use of a wasted spark on the EFI Euro1, after a dyno run, a near perfect mix of ethanol and air would end up in the plenum waiting for the engine to be cranked and ignited by the exhausting cylinder. Then BOOM the plenum would shoot into the air, with the majority of the welds split and any flat sides now bowed out.
The way around this problem (without spending a load of dosh on a new ECU) was to purge the plenum of any evaporated fuel by cranking the engine with no spark, stop, and then switch the ignition back on.
Even though we found a way around the problem we thought that in the heat of the driver change during the endurance this process might be forgotten, so the priorities of the plenum changed from a flow optimisation as the 1st priority to surviving dyno testing, after 3 more aluminium plenum shot of the engine and split across the welds a “bomb proof” design made from a 100mm round aluminium extrusion with a 4mm wall thinness with 4mm plates welded to the end proved tough enough.

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With the chassis and suspension fabrication drawing to a close with a lick of black paint, the initial assembly of the car started on schedule in the Easter holidays ready for a shake down in May.

Testing in May and June at our facility at Pembrey circuit went surprisingly smoothly as the cars setup and engine mapping was honed in, with a laptime dropping by nearly 4 seconds over the 07 car on the same coned up kart circuit.

Towards the end of our testing period, we did notice that the amount of torque biasing our Quaif ATB would was decreasing gradually even though the preload applied was to the maximum.
On a good note the number of people in the team increased as members of the 07 team finished the dissertations and wanted to help out with all the preparations of the competition at Silverstone.

Competition time…

Arrive at Silverstone in the early wednesday evening and set the pit boards and floor up, whilst trying to brush the rain out of the pit, finished by 11pm…time for bed to afford a early position in the queue for scrutineering.

Initial scrutineering did not go well as discussion about the interpretation of the rules regarding our structure between the front bulkhead and front roll hoop lead to a change in diameter of 2 of the bars connected to the bulkhead, and the requirement of a structural equivalency form for the square section tube on our lower chassis rail (although neither of these have been an issue at previous comps). Also the shoulder harness mounting bar had to have reinforcing bars added to it as the wall thinkness was fractionally to thin.

After a bit of welding and chopping back in the pits and the car passed tech inspection fairly easy, and sail through tilt, and passed the noise perfectly at bang on 110dB. Also egress time was much easier and faster the previous year.

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Static events.

Cost was what to be expected when only 1 day gets spent doing the report….23point…pretty much last.

Design on the other hand was a big disappointment, finishing 27th overall (even though they said they though the car would be fast) felt like a big drop from the 12th position we scored in 07 and we didn’t lose point on the report either. What seems really strange is a lot of the team were on the 07 team and we sure understood the car and our decisions better in 08. But hey competition was stiff, and its only just opinion at the end of the day and we didn’t have much in the way of bling to show off. We’d just have to show them our decisions were right by setting some smoking quick times on the track.

Business presentation 17th not bad…but not great.

Raceday.

First off skid pad….7th good job

Acceleration 6th Bit to much wheel spin still on launch though

Sprint 5th I think that we should have gone faster...the weather was closing in and we were close to the front of the queue, but TU delft noticed that our transponder was in the wrong position and we were asked to leave the queue to fix it. By the time we had our first run the track had a light sprinkling of rain and the cars time (along with others) wasn’t so fast. So we played a waiting game with the weather and after an hour and a half the sun was out again and the track drying fast, but it looked as if another shower was on the way, a set of sticker tyres and we went for it 5th place! Job done.

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Enduro day

Running 5th on the track was a real privilege against the big names in formula student! But still nerve biting as ever! And it was awesome to watch our car compete against all the big universities in Europe. The driver change was especially nerve wrecking as both Oxford Brookes and Lions did not re start, and the commentator was saying that we were having problems re-starting our engine (wasn’t a problem at all, it was just the driver purging the plenum before we restarted the engine). And we were off. Pheww! Halfway there…the second half seemed to take for ages to finish, but we made it!
Now this is where we hoped to play our trump card, our engine boys fuel economy strategy, and boy did it work! We finished a close 2nd 8 points down in fuel economy to TU delfts 150kg 450cc single despite having and additional 150ccs and a heap more weight! When the fuel economy was tied into our endurance time resulted in a 2nd place overall for the endurance!!!!

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In the end we ended up 6th overall, pretty happy with that! And all our targets achieved.

So back in Swansea the team check over the car before the entire team take it out for a jolly, turns out that the diff is now as good as completely open…

September rolls around and its time to get the ball rolling, the best news is that our success has encouraged a whole bunch of fresh faces to join the team with new ideas and experiences and test the living day lights out of the car!

First thing on the hit list was the diff, the idea of a spool has been batted around for awhile so a change of rear rocker geometry and welded up diff from a ford fiesta was installed, but the spool after a test or two was dismissed as it made the car twitchy. And the ultimate cornering speed was slower.

Plan b was to get a Tran x clutch type differential, which has had great affect on the car, making the car tractable and stable whilst getting on the power out of the corners. Also a reduction in caster and a reduction in scrub radius had made the car turn in faster and become more stable on the brakes.

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On the engine side of thing, we have swapped the F4i/Fy combo for a RR to save weight and as its getting increasing hard to source low mileage F4i’s. This has been Linked up to a EFI euro 4 (no more wasted spark) and is up and running on our dyno. Some no throttle testing has been done to analyse and justify the effects of a roller barrel throttle and a design has been produced using rapid prototyping. Also we have a new strategy for increasing our fuel economy especially as the new rules have increased the weighting in this area.

Chassis and suspension systems have been designed and are I the process of getting made from T45.

And the best news from a point’s point of view is that we have people looking at the cost and business reports already!!!

James Morris
Swansea Metropolitan University

[jm1495]

Hate to be a negative Nancy here but it's always a good idea to have your drivers in a fire suit when out testing. SDSM&T has a beautiful care, but you never know when something could catch fire.

[Huskie Motorsports TD]

The fire is just motivation to get out faster... http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif


Originally posted by jm1495:
Hate to be a negative Nancy here but it's always a good idea to have your drivers in a fire suit when out testing. SDSM&T has a beautiful care, but you never know when something could catch fire.

[Wesley]

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Our best finish of third at FSAE West definitely made this a memorable year, especially after our disappointing outing at Michigan.

[Mikey Antonakakis]

That's a good looking car wesley

[Mille]

My favorite memory of 2008 is destroying our rear suspension during driver training this summer and then having the car start on fire. Excellent.

[Mikey Antonakakis]

Mine had to be coming in last or close to last in several dynamic events, yet still finishing. This happened for a variety of reasons, driver error, fuel-level error (i.e. running so low on fuel halfway through a skidpad run that the engine was barely running), lack of testing, etc. But we still finished, and it was totally worth it. I can't wait to do it again, just maybe a little more prepared this time.

Oh yeah, the judges chatting with us about videos I posted on YouTube of us driving in a tiny parking garage with practically no safety equipment on was a good one too (that definitely won't happen again). Also, starting a fad of not wearing pants in the shop...
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