A Study on the Design and Manufacturing for Student Formula Japan Vehicle - Especially, Chassis of Student Formula Japan Vehicle -

Toshiki Yamashita,Toshio Otaka,Tomoaki Kodama,Yasuhiro Honda,Yuji Mizutani

doi:10.4271/2015-32-0829

Abstract

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">The main purpose of Formula SAE Competition (hereafter called “FSAE”, “Formula Society of Automotive Engineering”) is to let students learn the basic ability necessary for engineers through design, fabrication and test projects. Higher running performance of a manufactured vehicle is one of the most important themes that should be studied in Student Formula Japan Competition (hereafter called SFJ Competition). Also, SFJ Competition is the series of the FSAE. the purpose of this study, the chassis must be required light weighting and high stiffness. The former can reduce the centrifugal force and the inertial force in the turning and the latter can contribute to demonstrate the suspension performance according to design [1], [2], [3], [4]. The SFJ Competition has Skid Pad event to compete for steerage responsiveness and high suspension performance on turning. The balance of the highly performed engine and chassis requires to keep high running performance of competition vehicle [5],[6]. Additionally, it is necessary for improvement of the drivability to not only improve the engine torque in the low engine speed range, but also to improve the suspension performance infer the unsteady conditions such as slalom and acceleration at corner exit. This study refers to designing and manufacturing a competition vehicle for SFJ Competition with higher torsional rigid and bending rigid chassis and high speed running performance [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20]. I perform light weighting and a design, the production of the chassis of high-stiffness SFJ Competition vehicle and weigh the design level against an actual machine run examination. In this study, we investigated the differences between the design values and the test results by a vehicle with the chassis of light weighting and high-rigidity SFJ Competition [17], [18], [19], [20]. As the summary, <ol class="list nostyle"><li class="list-item">[1]<div class="htmlview paragraph">The rigid improvement of the chassis with big driver space reducing chassis rigidity is a chassis concept of this study. The improvement of the torsion rigidity and the bending rigidity of the chassis was confirmed by both results of the numerical computation and the experiments.</div></li><li class="list-item">[2]<div class="htmlview paragraph">The change of the camber angle at every each steering angle under the conditions of the vamping, bounding and a rolling can be controlled by the wheel alignments of suspension geometries decided in this study.</div></li><li class="list-item">[3]<div class="htmlview paragraph">A suspension system, steering system and brake system can be manufactured by the comparison between data obtained from the run experiments and design data in order to aim a high rank in the SFJ Competition.</div></li></ol></div></div>

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