FSAE stands for Formula Society of Automotive Engineers. SAE holds a competition every year for approximately 140 University teams to compete in. Teams are judged on design, cost and performance. The University of Windsor has being competing in the FSAE competition for 5 years now. Our team website can be found here. Our formula car has a Honda CBR F4i engine with a 20 mm diameter restrictor. The total budget of the car is around $20 000 CAD. Our car weighs about 480 lbs and produces about 75 Hp. Virtually every component on the car is designed and built by our team.

What are the FSAE competition objectives?

"The Formula SAE? competition is for SAE student members to conceive, design, fabricate, and compete with small formula-style racing cars. The restrictions on the car frame and engine are limited so that the knowledge, creativity, and imagination of the students are challenged. The cars are built with a team effort over a period of about one year and are taken to the annual competition for judging and comparison with approximately 120 other vehicles from colleges and universities throughout the world. The end result is a great experience for young engineers in a meaningful engineering project as well as the opportunity of working in a dedicated team effort." http://students.sae.org/competitions/formulaseries/rules/

What Is Being Learned?

CNC Machining
Composite Materials
Welding
Material Selection using Finite Element Analysis
Design software such as CATIA, SOLDWORKS, COSMOS, ADAMS, I-DEAS, etc.
Crash test simulation using LS DYNA. Physical crash test testing on crushzone.
Project management skills
Cost and Budgeting skills: Team must raise their own money and be able to produce the part for as cheap as possible.
Team Work (Team is chosen by the school. Students must learn to work together)

Parts or Systems I Designed

Click on the Picture for further explanation

Crush Zone

The crush zone must have a minimum frontal area of 200 sq cm and decelerate the vehicle by an acceptable limit. Materials and design is left open to the students.

Chassis Tube Sizes and design

(click on picture for more description)

The chassis must be made from steel with a minimum of 0.1% carbon. Wall thickness is limited on the main safety structure, but is unlimited on the stiffening members.

Torsional Rigidity Jig

For proper suspension and chassis design, torsional rigidity of the chassis must be known. I designed this jig to fix the rear wheels of the vehicle while applying a moment to the front wheels and measuring the angle of twist to get the stiffness in (ft-lbs/degree

Here is a picture of our vehicle at the competition. Our team placed 68th out of 140 teams. We had 20/22 laps finished of the endurance and one of our uprigths broke. If we finished the last 2 laps with the time we were averaging we would have came top 30. Its kind of upsetting, however the experience was amazing our team learned so much. I would recommend Formula SAE to any engineer who is willing to do a lot of hard work.

For more detailed information about our car and our team please visit our website. .