Well the past couple weeks I've been MIA as I"m sure many noticed without my post whoring around lately lol. I've spent the past 8-9 months designing and building a Formula Hybrid SAE racecar for my senior design project here at Drexel. I wanted to post weekly updates on the progress but was too busy, so here's one long post with pics to summarize the whole thing lol.
Quick Background on the project
More info on the event: Formula Hybrid
Its an autocross, endurance, and acceleration race for hybrid SAE race cars from all over the world. This year is the 3rd year and there's 31 universities registered for this years event. Last year there were 14 teams and Drexel came in 6th after breaking a generator shaft half way through.
My Involvement
I'm the captain for the electrical team (4 EE's and 5 ME's), and club "president", but I've sort of swapped rolls with the treasurer since he does most of our PR stuff and I do all of our money stuff. All in all we spent $30K in this project and raised it all ourselves through proposals to the departments, private companies, and family member donations. We've reached our goal of spending more than what 1 year of tuition costs at Drexel on the car ($27k) lol, and not spending more than $100 out of my own pocket on the entire project....I bought a set of Dukes of Hazard horns to put on the car LOL!!! At the competition since I'm too tall to technically fit in the car by the competition rules, I was pretty much the crew chief making sure things got done in the paddock while the drivers walked the course and raced the car.
Cliff Notes on Competition
We competed in Loudon NH at NH Motor Speedway May 4-6th and placed 3rd out of 29 teams that competed! Our car performed flawlessly! We were actually 1st place for series architecture hybrids Since we did so well, we were also invited to a similar Formula Hybrid competition in Italy this October. Its at Fiat's test track just outside of Rome, so looks like I'll be getting a free trip to Italy!
PICS!....what we started with...leftover from 2008. They used a 7 hp lawnmower engine to drive a 200 amp perm generator to charge 30 caps and drive a 10 hp series wound motor.
You can see we weren't left with much after the FSAE team stripped the car of all the parts the '08 team borrowed from one of the older FSAE cars.
This is all we reused in our car. The chassis front of the main roll hoop, and the nose cone that dan did a total makeover on. This front chassis was from the 2006 FSAE car.
Starting off only 1 of the 9 of us knew how to weld. Now that 1 guy is VERY good, steel, aluminum, titanium, he's done quite a bit so far, and the ME captain is pretty good too. Everything on the car is tig welded. Me and the ME captain Matt built the main chassis over christmas break...I did more of the cutting, fishmouthing, tube bending, fixturing, and Matt did the welding. I tigged a few scrap pieces and left it at that lol. This is Matt welding our rear box, and that sweet piece of bent round tubing is the rear box bulkhead I bent on the hydraulic tubing bender
The square parts on the car are the ones I fixtured up The warped to chit pieces are the ones another guy welded that didn't want to fixture anything because he just figured you weld one side and it warps one way, then you weld the other side and it warps back lmao
Pro-Engineer was used for the Chassis drawings..
Progress right before christmas break...
Squaring up the frame for rear supports to the roll hoop...
Looks like we have a FRAME!
Drexel has a full machine shop right next to our lab where we're building the car, so we've got access to all the cool machines. This is a Wire-EDM machine that basically uses a super thin brass wire and electricity to vaporize the metal away under water to cut out very precise pieces of whatever you want. Here we were making brake hats for the rear rotors...
Rear brake rotor hats fresh out of the wire edm machine...
Schoman lathing rear bearing mounts
Various machined pieces
Mock up of the Ninja 250ex motorcycle internal combustion engine (ICE), Mars 300 amp permanent magnet generator, and dual Mars 300 amp permanent magnet drive motors
One bank of 30 Maxwell capacitors (3000 Farads each!), 72V bank, 30 caps in series wired in parallel with another bank of 30, so one on each side of the car
This setup is an independent rear drive electronic slip differential. There's 2 pots on the steering shaft that input the steering wheel position into a microcontroller to compensate power to each rear wheel independently for increased handling around turns.
Coming along...
My cool plexiglas enclosures I made for the capacitor banks...or for fish tanks if we say lets scrap the hybrid stuff and turn that engine 90 degrees and run straight off that haha
Rules are pretty strict for high voltage isolation, so all the 2 gauge cable HV runs are in orange insulative conduit and terminated in black electronics enclosures
2/3rds of our team that decided to show up on the day we had to take the team photo for the competition booklets
High voltage wiring nearly completed...
here's the not so purdy body panels we started with from 2008, that were cut up & bondo'ed together from a previous FSAE car
Chassis stripped down for painting & weighing....came in at 115 lbs. Heavier than we would have liked, but its all mild steel. Hopefully the 2010 team we're trying to get built up before we all graduate will build a new chassis with chromoly or even titanium
Primered
Check out the rattle can skills LoL!
Chassis painted, and A-arms fabricated
Back to Deebee53's fine work!
We could show up in primer and look better than last year lol
Soldering all the ring terminals onto the 2 gauge HV cables
ICE wiring harness mocked up for initial start up of the engine. Temporary fuel tank duct taped to the roll hoop makes for a nice head rest lol
Got it alive & running! Then I spent a full day disecting the wiring harness down to the bare minimum and wiring it into the chassis
Killer moon eyes fuel tank!
That we had to cut right in half
The rules require a 1.32 gallon fuel tank (5 liters), so we had to take the 1 gallon moon eyes tank and section it
Home made tank extension lol...more pics of the finished product later down the line...
Rear chain guards built & installed
Tight friggin connections inside the twin controller enclosure to isolate the terminations in another custom contraption of a plexiglas box to appease the rules & regulations for isolation :lame:
Steering rack installed & hand throttle for ICE RPM installed...
Front chain guard installed and custom ansi sprocket machined for ICE output shaft
High Voltage (HV) box 90% completed, Low Voltage (LV) box started
Moon eyes tank finish welded. Was Schomans first time welding aluminum, but he got the hang of it pretty well by the time he finished as you can tell he did the outer two seams first then finished with the center seam lol. The big spots are where he just filled in with filler rod from cutting off the filler neck.
Even though it gets hidden behind the seat, I had to bling it up a bit, so I took it home and polished it up a bit
Bling Bling! Half finished
More of Deebee's fine handywork...
HV box 100% completed. I'm VERY meticulous with my wiring, all the LV spiral wrapped in black, all the HV wiring spiral wrapped in orange, everything shrink wrapped, zip tied, etc. lol. Looks like a mess of wiring, but for as much 2 gauge cable & fuses & relays crammed in there its laid out about as nice as it possibly can be.
LV box with just the ground fault detector circuit board and the 12V distribution strip. All the wires coming in the right are from the throttle/brake/steering pots, LCD display, current meters, & controllers. Box gets crowded FAST! lol
Even got as fancy as braiding the pairs of wires for the potentiometers & whatnot with the drill lol
Dash built, just waiting for installing the LCD & digital dash display
Foam uprights CNC machined for testing before throwing the chunk of aluminum in
Modified fuel tank installed and new filler neck welded on
Coming together slowly but surely...
Both banks of capacitors installed on either side of the ****pit
Ready for uprights, spindles, & wheels!
Lastly, dan's airbrushing work to drool over once more
Running the CNC practice code on a foam block for the front uprights...
low voltage box wiring is a bit crammed, this is up to my wiring finished running wires from all the LV controls, switches, pots, controllers, meters, etc. in the car into the box, then the microcontroller guy came in and hooked all my runs into his board.
Custom made driveshafts. They're overkill, but the CV joints most FSAE guys run are actually from VW's its a 27mm spline shaft, so one of our guys got 4 used axles, then Matt lopped the spines off, and welded them into a tube for our 8" driveshafts lol
Janisch mounting our 20" hoosiers on our new 13" Keizer aluminum/magnesium center wheels
9" front rotors, Wilwood racing calipers, cool orange paint with blue anodized fittings
Setting the rear ride height
We're a little upset with the rims. For $300 each and custom made, the rims are around 0.080 out of wack. Not much we can do at this point though
Here's for you deebee! This flashes up on our LCD display when you start the car before it switches over to voltage & current readings
The rear spindles stick out a bit far, little odd design, but our suspension guy insisted on hitting his points for suspension optimization. Still looks pretty cool lol
Front uprights, spindles, & brakes done. Spindles were machined by Schoman out of a $650 150 lb block of 4340 lol
Back of front uprights, wheel speed sensor, camber brackets, etc.
Light bank of carbon filament resistive lightbulbs and an oven heating element to discharge the cap banks to work on the electrical system
Caps will be charged to 72VDC. For now we only took them up to 40 to setup the controller code. Should get them to full charge tonight. They can go from drained to fully charged all 60 caps in about a minute
We had to discharge the caps first time charging to fix a connection, and our one guy put the jumper cables across the reverse protection diode protecting the generator from the caps. There was a LIGHTNING BOLT in the box, blew a hole inthe jumper cable, and for a split second while it was jumpered it made the generator act like a motor and since the ICE was in gear, the generator turned motor actually turned the engine over and started it up
DUKES OF HAZARD HORNS! Yes, there's 5 horns under the seat that blow the tune of the General Lee! We've got a confederate flag patch we're putting on the headrest
Programming the microcontroller, and flipping the wheels down for time travel mode back to the future...flux capacitors charged up!
Car on the corner scales!
FAT BOTTOM GIRL! She's a pig! Its about average for Hybrid SAE cars though, and it should have some BALLS compared to last years car to really get up and get moving. This is without a driver. L/R distribution evened out after we set the pushrods. With a 150 lb driver in the car the F/R weight distribution moves from 44/56 to 48/52. Once the body panels are on it'll probably shift to maybe 49/51 depending how much bondo dan has in that nose cone to smooth it out LoL!!
One of my favorite shots
Looks badazz from the rear! We'll get that LV box bolted back down and the wires tied down so its all finished up.
Front view will look just as cool as the rear once those sweet body panels are on!
Ready to test drive!
Next post....COMPETITION!