FSAE is Not a Kit Car Competition

[Claude Rouelle]

At the last few FSAE and Formula Student competitions, I have witnessed the occurrence of more and more ready-to-go, ready-to-bolt-in impact attenuators with the engineering study also being delivered by the supplier. I have also observed the occurrence of complete suspension parts (hub, upright, wishbones, etc., etc.) bought by teams and bolted onto their car.

In my opinion, this goes completely against the goals of the FSAE / Formula Student competitions that are engineering DESIGN competitions in which the students are challenged to use their education, imagination, and teamwork to understand and define a problem, simulate, design, manufacture, assemble, test, and analyze the performance of the parts or parts assembly they created to get the best possible solution in the “form follows function” spirit.

I believe that the design, manufacturing, assembly, and testing of a Formula Student car cannot be summarized to the assembly of a puzzle. If that was the case, all a team would need is a lot of money to build a competitive Formula student car, although the students would still have to convince the design judges of the why, how, and how much were their engineering choices. Of course, I understand that not all teams have the time, budget, or resources to design and build their own steering wheel, exhaust, or brake discs and calipers. The border between the design and manufacture and bought parts is not well defined by the rules, nor should it be

However, to make things simple and direct, in my design judge opinion, whatever team or teams come with such bolt-in parts—especially suspensions—will have to convince me of their serious analysis, simulation, and validation work in order for me to give them a decent score.

[Jay Lawrence]

What a terrible and exclusionist attitude. "You clearly have an engine that you didn't whittle from a single billet, therefore I award you zero points."

Fostering innovation is great, but if you take it to the extreme of saying (as a design judge, not as a rule maker) that certain parts on the car should be built whilst others should be bought, you are shooting down every team's ability to make their own decisions.

[Mitchell]

I agree 100% with Claude. I would also like to add that at the last few FS competitions I have attended I have noticed a growing trend of people using off the shelf simulation software. This is just not acceptable as engineers. There is ample opportunity in this competition to develop your own coding language to write simulation software, that runs in a standalone bespoke CAD/FEA/CFD package. Once you have this up and running you should easily be able to design and simulate your suspension upright and achieve full optemisery.

[Kevin Hayward]

While I see the irony that Claude supplies software that could readily be written by teams, I can't help but mostly agree with his sentiment.

Formula Student/SAE has developed into a decent sized market and with that a lot of purpose built components have become available. The number of these products is likely only to increase in the future.

I prefer the approach of teams that do more of their cars, but I see the wisdom of significantly reducing the required work for relatively small amounts of money. I have observed that the Design Judging does not seem to offer significant rewards to those teams that design and manufacture a larger percentage of their cars, nor provide any disincentives to those teams that purchase significant systems off-the-shelf. Maybe Claude, as a design judge, could institute some change on that front.

To be a little cheeky and reference one of Claude's previous posts I don't think whining on the forum is going to change anything.

Kev

[Mitchell]

We have joked about buying a whole TRX450 quad bike and making an SAE spec chassis for it, but recycling as many components as possible.

Would the team expect to do well in design? probably not.

Would it get a new team up and running for <$5000 and completing events? for sure.

I personally like to refer to SAE documentation.
http://www.fsaeonline.com/content/FS...et%20150pt.pdf

Design (~25%): Assessment of design process used by team. Is this a new design, evolution,
or complete carryover? Were different design options considered? Were appropriate pre-build
analyses performed?

Build (~25%): Does physical specimen presented reflect the early design work? Is it reflected
in design report? If not, why not? What special manufacturing considerations were
encountered?

Refinement/Validation (~25%): How thorough and honest has the team been about testing?
Was a test plan developed and executed? Were discrepancies between predicted and tested
results documented and acted upon to improve final build?

Understanding (~25%): Is the team that presents the car at competition truly intimate with the
design? Can they quickly give detailed answers about any sub-system? Or do they have to “go
ask someone else”?

[JulianH]

Claude,

I visited a couple of European competitions in the last years. I don't know how many; by far not an amount that can stack up to yours, but at least double digits...

I agree, that the "Standard Impact Attenuator" was a bit "forced" on teams as they are asking a dynamic testing for FSG. Some teams are apparently not able to get a testing facility for that. I don't know if that is again a "then just look for it" or a real problem in some places of the world.
We always spend a lot of time into our IA. I think we used a full team member every year to design, manufacture and test one (the people doing that only made some minor other parts, like the Steering Wheel or Business Plan or whatever).
It is a lot of work, for a small gain (pointswise). So I understand, that an underfunded or understaffed team decides to take that shortcut.

Otherwise, I don't really see that teams are using more and more off-the-shelf parts. I of course did not ask all of them, but I cannot remember multiple teams buying uprights...

The question just is: Where to stop?

Karlsruhe/Graz have customized engines - THERE ARE TEAMS USING STOCK ENGINES!!
Zurich started to design own electric motors - THOSE BLOODY DUTCH ARE BUYING OFF THE SHELF AMK MOTORS!!
Delft is desiging own tires - THOSE BLOODY SWISS ARE BUYING OFF THE SHELF HOOSIER TIRES (point taken, they are now developing tires with Continental...)
Zurich has designed air springs with rheologically controlled damping rates - THOSE BLOODY GERMANS BUY OFF THE SHELF ÖHLINS

There were always parts that "everyone" needed to buy. And the whole competition "respected" that.

I fully agree, that FSAE is not a Kit-Car competition. I fully agree, that you should not buy the best possible option and only design a frame that holds everything together.
But, I don't agree that we should demonize all buy parts and I also don't agree that this is a new trend swapping over.



Mitchell,
I don't fully agree that using "off the shelf" simulation tools are necessarily a bad thing.
You don't design your own CFD simulation code if you can use CD-adapco, Ansys or whatever.
I even think the rudimentary lapsim that you can get from Claude is a good starting point to set your design goals. We build a customized lapsim in 2012, it was a huge project, is still perfectly used and I think it helped us quite a bit, but the basic sensitivities about weight, aero, power, etc. should be feasible to extract from a simple simulation.
A couple of years ago, nobody used a lapsim, it was just a pissing contest, how you decided on the design targets and nobody bothered. Now, you are bad if you use what is on the market?

I don't think that this is really "bad engineering" as a starting point. Simulation in the end can lead to bad engineering if you cannot verify your simulations...

[JT A.]

This very quickly turns into a "where do you draw the line" argument.

Why is buying an engine, transmission, radiator, differential, axles, wheels, tires, brake calipers, electronics, bearings, etc all fine, but buying a hub or an A-arm isn't? What is so special about a hub?
Why is buying all driver safety equipment (belts, suits, shoes, helmets, etc) not only allowed but mandatory, but buying an impact attenuator is looked down upon? Why the distinction?

I think it is funny that what people consider OK to buy off the shelf in FSAE just happens to mirror almost exactly the way professional racing teams traditionally operate.

Non-spec racing series generally have suppliers for the engine, wheels, tires, dampers, drivetrain parts, brake components, safety equipment, electronics, etc. The only major systems they make are the chassis and suspension linkages (just brackets to hold all the purchased parts together). And aero/bodywork components if they aren't spec'd by the series.
Isn't that very similar to how the vast majority of FSAE teams operate, without any complaint from the judges/event organizers?

To me it seems too similar to be a coincidence. I think a lot of design judges/event organizers' ideas of what should be made by the students is based on their background in motorsports. "That's how the race teams I've been involved with worked, so thats how FSAE teams should operate". Yet aren't we constantly reminded by design judges that this is NOT professional racing. That we shouldn't do things a certain way just because that's how Formula 1 or other racing series does it?

If a team just buys stuff and cobbles it together without understanding anything about any of the parts they chose, it will be very apparent in design. Give them 0 points if you want, that's totally fair.

If you have team A that buys brake calipers from Brembo with the justication "they're sized appropriately, they're good quality, and it would take too much time/effort/money away from other areas to design & manufacture our own"
But then if you have team B that buys an upright & hub assembly with the same justifications and some basic analysis to confirm the stiffness/weight is adequate and they can achieve decent kinematics. Then they used the time they saved to put more effort into something else with higher impact on performance.

Should team B be scored lower than team A?

[Charles Kaneb]

Several of the Texas schools do not fishmouth each frame tube in house with an air grinder anymore. Texas A&M, for example, gets these tubes laser-cut by G&H Diversified. It cuts time off both the design process (reduced need to build in tolerance-adapting adjustments for hand-cut tubes) and fabrication.
If several teams found that their front suspension pickup points were in similar locations (only 1 or 2 points that were more than 25 mm different), I'd think they could all benefit from a common front tub, designed collaboratively and with one set of molds made for several different cars. They'd learn a lot from the process of working collaboratively with teams with different processes and priorities, like a joint venture in industry, and accomplish things that would not be in the budget or schedule individually. I'd see it as an easily defensible design decision.

Many more parts on these cars used to be COTS, back in the "tube-frame 13" tire no-wing Honda F4i" era. I remember seeing many VW Golf wheel bearings and some Golf hubs, 1992-2000 Honda Civic radiators and fans (Still a REALLY good choice - plastic tanked, very light, and well under $100).

Do you build your own wheel shells? Centers? Texas A&M found out the hard way that that one COTS center was not suitable for an aero car, and reverted to centers that whiltebeitel designed, but we did not buy time on a spinning machine to make shells or build molds to make them out of a carbon composite.

What you design and build has to make the best use of your time and resources - as well as making good use of the skills and equipment you think you need to add in the near future! I remember being on the losing side of an argument with the Kansas team on this forum about composite tub vs steel tube frame construction. He pointed out that while the Texans had welding experience and oil & gas industry connections that made it easier to get tubes cut, the Kansans had more composite experience and only occasional access to a welder. While a tub would have been very difficult for us, a tube-frame would've been very difficult for them!

[Charles Kaneb]

Also, if someone needs to do dynamic testing of an impact attenuator, the "barrel rig" I designed and we built at Case Western is probably still sitting in a basement. It consists of a 55 gallon steel barrel with 600# of concrete molded in, with accelerometers to measure deceleration. It is released from an overhead crane using a quick-release hook, travels down two 3" steel pipes to strike the target at the bottom. A 1kHz low-pass filter is needed on the accelerometer outputs to get clean results. It hasn't injured anyone yet, but I'm not sure if they'd sell it.

[Will M]

I would echo the sentiments from coleasterling and Charles Kaneb.
I work in manufacturing and the best lessons I learned from FSAE had nothing to do with making parts.
Instead the best lessons were about Engineering Project Management.

In fact I would argue that the only reasons to design your own parts rather than buy them are:
1) Required by the rules.
2) You believe you can learn something by doing so.
3) You can achieve a competitive advantage over off the self parts.

Otherwise you are most likely wasting your time.
Like I said learning how to manage your time (Engineering Project Management) was the most valuable lesson; at least for me.
Now is that?
Because many the design exercises found in FSAE are extremely narrow in scope.
But Project Management is a universally applicable skill and is needed by every successful engineer.

In short I agree that a team should not be penalized for using Compoennt Off The Shelf.
Regardless if they choose a COTS or their own design an equal analytic justification is required.

-William