Structural Design and Simulation of Lightweight Formula SAE Racing Car
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Date
2018-10
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Currently, car racing takes place in Ethiopia. But still, there is a big question ‘How it has been designed?’, ‘What kind of cars?’, and ‘How the safety of driver seems?’. This research focused on the structural design and simulation of Formula SAE lightweight racing car: it is based on the Formula Society of Automotive Engineering that demands with intention to introduced the Formula SAE Chassis and Crash Box in Ethiopia, without compromising the structural safety and performance, according to geometry improvement, improving boundary condition used, weight reduction, material selection and crashworthiness of the vehicle.
The structural design of Formula SAE Chassis and Crash Box were performed by using SOLIDWORK2018, and their simulation was done using ANSYS 19.1 FEA simulation software. The design and analysis of Formula SAE racing car Chassis consider seven types of loading conditions, such as static (pure bending, pure torsion, braking, lateral cornering, horizontal lozenging and combination) and crash (front, side, and rollover) loading. According to the result of Von-Mess stress and failure criterion, the material shows the resistance to the applied stress because the Von-Misses stress from a different type of loading is below the yield strength of SAE 1018 steel material. All the deformation result from different loading conditions are less than 25 mm. In addition to that, the torsional stiffness shows an increment by 19.53% and weight reduction by 20.81% from Formula SAE Chassis M1 model (old model).
The main reasons of the adding the crash box in any vehicle is to absorb more energy especially for racing cars and three types model considered according to Formula SAE rule, using Aluminum 7075-T651 plate by applying Johnson-Cook strength and material models because of impact simulation complicity. Then FEA simulation result shows adding holes and caterpillar geometry increase the total deformation (70.606mm to 141.49mm), reduce the peak crash force (110.82KN to 53.21KN), average acceleration (31.6g to 11.78g), peak acceleration (37.08g to 17.86g) and increase energy absorption (7388.82J to 7488.18J) comparing the Crash Box models. Finally, the Formula SAE M3 Crash Box model is selected for the Formula SAE racing car because of less peak crash force with a larger time to rich it, beneficial energy absorption, higher velocity generation, satisfactory average acceleration, satisfactory peak acceleration, smooth, steady and large total deformation due to the adding of the caterpillar geometry in the Formula SAE Crash Box from bioinspired idea caterpillar insect.
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Keywords
Finite Element Analysis (FEA), Model, Simulation, Topological optimization, Formula SAE Chassis, Crash Box