Minor: Lightweight Vehicle Design
The minor I chose in my study was the lightweight vehicle
design minor, I chose this minor because of my inclination towards motorsports.
Within motorsports, it is very important for the vehicle to be lightweight to
perform well in competitions. The weight of the vehicle affects almost every
aspect of the vehicle, the handling, the braking performance, acceleration as
well as the fuel consumption. As a chassis engineer, I believe it is important
to know how to design lightweight parts.
During my study the subjects included lightweight
constructions, composite material science, mechanics of materials and finite
element analysis. We were introduced to several techniques to achieve
lightweight structures. This included using topology optimisation using finite
element analysis, using sandwich panels, composites as well as lightweight
materials like aluminium, titanium and magnesium.
Solidworks static simulation, torsion test
In this minor I, along with fellow students also opted to
take part in a competition. This was the SAMPE bridge building competition 2018-2019.
In this competition several universities from the Benelux region took part. Although
this was a competition which wasn’t directly related to automotive engineering,
it was still related to structural engineering which is a part of automotive
engineering.
In this competition we had to make a miniature bridge within
the specifications and rules of the competition organisation. At the end, a testing
day was organised to see which bridge was the strongest and the stiffest.
3-point bend test to test the bridge
The bridge we chose to make was an eco-friendly sandwich
panel bridge. We used a balsa core and for the skin we made a flax fibre skin using
unidirectional fibres, since the bridge would only be subject to a 3-point bend
test. We used the knowledge we learnt in the lightweight minor to improve out
bridge, set optimum core and skin to minimise the weight of the bridge and
improve the stiffness and strength.
Gluing of cores, prepared skins of sandwich beam
Joining of the skin and core of the sandwich beam
We took our mini bridge to the competition at the Ghent University and met with our fellow competitors, a lot of us had very interesting designs and it was great to see the differences in design, we also learnt a lot from our competitors designs. Overall the experience was great, we finished 4th out of the 9 teams that participated. Our bridge failed due to core failure, it failed at a load less than what we had achieved previously, we believe this was because of the fibre orientation of the Balsa. Working with natural materials can lead to slightly unpredictable mechanical properties and unfortunately that’s what had happened. However, we were very pleased as we had gone against several competitors and had put our knowledge from the minor to good use.
Preparation of the composite skin using vacuum infusion
I look forward to putting my knowledge to use in my
professional work to make lightweight parts and offer lightweight engineering solutions
within chassis engineering
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