Leveraging IoT in Formula SAE Contests: A Case Study of Cal Poly Pomona Formula SAE Team

• Networks & Connectivity - Ethernet
• Sensors - Autonomous Driving Sensors

• Automotive
• Life Sciences

• Product Research & Development

• Smart Parking
• Vehicle-to-Infrastructure

• Testing & Certification

The Cal Poly Pomona Formula SAE (CPPFSAE) team, a student-run team participating in the Formula SAE® contests, faced a significant challenge in their quest to be among the best in the competition. Each year, the team sought to apply new materials and technologies to improve their race cars. However, the introduction of new materials such as composites created new requirements and design and development challenges. The team's goal was to leverage the advantages of each material, such as lightweight design or stiffness potential, but each material had to be designed individually. A specific challenge arose when the team decided to design and optimize a new wheel shell. They needed a software tool that would allow them to create a composite laminate design. They encountered difficulties in getting the carbon fiber laminate prepreg to conform to their mold, which they attempted to solve by increasing the number of debulking cycles and switching to hot debulk. A post machining process on the wheel was also necessary.

The Cal Poly Pomona Formula SAE (CPPFSAE) team is a student-run team that competes in the Formula SAE, an international collegiate design competition. The competition is one of the largest of its kind worldwide, attracting students from dozens of countries. The CPPFSAE team members invest hundreds of hours in hands-on engineering as they design, build, and test their race car from scratch, all while being full-time students at Cal Poly Pomona. The team interacts with industry professionals and competes against top international teams. With over 20 years of competition experience and more than 30 team members, CPPFSAE is one of the top teams in the world. The experience gained by team members makes them highly sought after employees in many of the world's top automotive companies.

The CPPFSAE team chose Altair's HyperWorks suite for the design and development of the new wheel shell. The software offered robust features for designing and analyzing laminates, making it an ideal tool for their project. The team began the design process by creating the geometry in their standard CAD system, which served as a mold. They then imported the CAD model into HyperWorks and generated a surface mesh of the model, including special areas where they planned to use carbon fiber. The team created the laminate on top of the mesh and used the OptiStruct solver to run a finite element analysis. They then varied parameters, layers, and the orientation of the layers based on the results OptiStruct delivered. The team's design optimizations were based on minimizing the number of layers needed to achieve approximately a 10 percent increase in stiffness. HyperWorks allowed them to go straight into manufacturing a virtually final product.

• The use of HyperWorks in the design and development process of the CPPFSAE team's race car brought about significant operational benefits. The team was able to increase the stiffness of the chosen components by 10 percent while learning how to do a structural layout of carbon fiber composites. The software also allowed the team to decrease the unsprung mass of the car, a critical factor in race car performance. Furthermore, the team was able to go directly from design and analysis to production, streamlining their process and saving valuable time. The experience also provided the team with practical knowledge on how to work with state-of-the-art CAE software and apply a streamlined design and development process for composites, skills that are highly valuable in their future careers.

• Increase of wheel shell stiffness by 10 percent
• Decrease in the unsprung mass of the race car
• Ability to go directly from design and analysis to production