Designing Formula SAE cars at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) | Rensselaer Motorsport
Welcome to another recap of the Next Generation Design podcast for the episode: Designing Formula SAE Cars with Rensselaer Motorsport. You can watch the full video version of the episode below.
On this episode of the Next Generation Design podcast, our host Greg Arnot, is joined by Elliot Wilk and Levi Hlavac, two dual-major aerospace and mechanical engineering students at RPI that are part of Rensselaer Motorsport. In this episode, you will learn how members of Rensselaer Motorsport manage a balance between their coursework and the demands of the club, why CAD is such an incredibly important tool for them, and how NX aids in their complex design process.
What you’ll learn in this episode:
What is Rensselaer Motorsport?
Rensselaer Motorsport is a Formula SAE team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York. Formula SAE (FSAE) is a competition hosted by the International Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE International) that tasks student teams to design, build and compete formula-style cars. The Rensselaer team includes 25-30 student team members with different roles.
[At the time of the recording,] Levi is the Technical Director responsible for overseeing the engineering and design and collaboration of the teams. Elliot is the Aeronautical Project Manager, responsible for aerodynamics and body work.
Challenges in the Formula SAE car design process
Greg asks the two student engineers what their biggest challenges are with getting the car from concept to design to the competition. Elliot notes that system integration and communicating are big challenges when different teams are designing different parts of the car. “There are a ton of components on the car, tabs that are welded, things that are bolted on, and tons of different fasteners, so you have to make sure the car works together.” He adds that they don’t include everything that will be in the final car in the CAD environment, like wires for example, but it’s important to acknowledge while designing that they will still be there and thus the design needs to make space for them.
Levi agrees that communication is always a challenge every year when it comes to the design. “When you have 20 or 30 college students all coming together with their schooling, in their free time, not getting paid or not getting credit for the work they do on the car, emotions can get pretty high and intense pretty fast,” he adds. With many different people on different projects, they need to remember to communicate with the whole team to make sure designs stay up-to-date and aligned with each other. With such a quick design cycle, if one person does not communicate or falls behind, it causes issues down the line. Levi jokes that it’s easy for RPI engineers to break down communication in just one week.
The importance of CAD in Formula SAE
Greg then asks how important CAD is to designing the Formula SAE vehicle, to which Levi responds “If we don’t have any CAD, it doesn’t exist.” He explains that sometimes, a team member will have an idea in their head but the best way to communicate it is to put it in a 3D model then put it into the assembly. He also notes the importance of being able to design within context of the assembly so that each person knows their designs aren’t interfering with other parts of the car or running into other components— especially with everything fighting for space in such a tight-packed design—even if the full assembly does increase the load times by a few minutes.
Levi adds that without CAD, no one will know where a component is supposed to go and thus other teams can’t work around it even though it’s imperative that they do all work around each other. He concludes, “t’s absolutely instrumental to have good CAD, updated CAD, and CAD that works together in the assembly because, without that, we can’t communicate how our designs are and how they change because they change constantly.” With integration of systems and communication being big challenges in the design process, leveraging CAD helps them reduce those challenges and effectively communicate ideas across teams.
Why Rensselaer Motorsport chose NX CAD
Rensselaer Motorsport uses NX as their CAD software of choice, the same software that is being taught in their engineering coursework at RPI. With the school teaching NX as well as other software from the Siemens Xcelerator platform including from the Simcenter platform, new members of the team can easily begin designing since they already have experience in NX. They also note the importance of simulation integrated into NX, with native validation and simulation tools in the design software as well as seamless integration to Simcenter applications.
Why is design-integrated simulation so important in the racing and automotive industry?
Levi once again emphasizes the importance of having design and simulation on the same platform. NX CAD includes both design-integrated simulation tools as well as integration to Simcenter applications. “If you were to use another CAD software, you would have to import the 3D model and put it in this simulation, and then that comes with some disadvantages. You can’t change your 3D model very easily after the fact. There are a lot of things that change,” says Levi.
Elliot adds that CAD and simulation allow them to reach their metrics-based goals faster such as for weight or strength of parts. With NX, they can create more reliable parts and simplify complexity as they can simulate and validate designs earlier in the design process and quickly iterate if needed before creating the car in the real world. This helps them both reduce design time and costs.
The team uses simulation throughout the design process as they design the parts in CAD, run a simulation to assess how the parts can withstand force and they also do the hand calculations. If the part does not pass testing or their goals, they must reiterate and change the design. “We’re always running simulations, and we’re always doing validation,” Elliot notes. With design-integration simulation in NX CAD, it’s simple for them to reiterate on the design once simulation is complete, and then they can repeat the design and simulation process. This ensures that they don’t create parts that break or don’t work in the real world.
Designing cars with the integration between NX design and Simcenter simulation
Greg, Elliot and Levi continue to discuss the importance of using software products that are “connected” and integrated. In addition to NX, Rensselaer Motorsport leverages software from the Simcenter portfolio, including Simcenter STAR-CCM+ fluid simulation. With integration between Simcenter and NX, they quickly run simulations and can seamlessly go back and forth between the two software applications. This saves them time and helps them get their designs right. “If I had to export every single time, it would just be a bunch of time wasted, and I wouldn’t be able to work as efficiently as I could,” Levi says. He also adds that some students prefer to edit a 3D model within STAR-CCM+ itself which helps save even more time and allow for quicker design iterations.
Advice for CAD learners
Elliot says that people learning CAD for the first time could look at tutorials online, but that it’s best to learn from other people in a collaborative environment. He learned NX in his CAD class at RPI, and he also learned from other students and members on the Renssealer Motorsport team as they were able to teach him how to optimize his CAD designs. He suggests to spend a lot of time actually doing CAD and not just learning the concepts. “Just doing it constantly, having new problems to solve in CAD, is just going to build your skill level,” he says. For learning NX specifically, Elliot notes that he used a lot of Siemens Xcelerator Academy lessons.
Predictions for the future of automotive design
Greg asks the Renssealer team members about their thoughts and predictions on the future of automotive design, touching on topics like computing power, immersive engineering, AI and sustainability.
Elliot predicts that simulations will get faster as computing power increases, and also sees 3D modeling in virtual reality. Greg then mentions Immersive Engineering and the collaboration between Siemens and Sony with NX Immersive Designer, which will allow engineers to do just that and be “in” their design as they manipulate and edit designs. Elliot and Levi both agree that Rensselaer Motorsport would be interested in leveraging Immersive Engineering and that it would help them to reduce time wasted on trying to get the right view of an assembly or understanding the real-life scale of certain part designs, as parts are often bigger in real life than they expect from the CAD design on their computer screen.
Levi touches on the AI topic, mentioning that he thinks there will be AI assistants for simulation or to catch mistakes that would speed up the design process and expedite the user experience in setting up simulations. In the 3D modeling space, he isn’t as sure but believes that AI could help optimize designs once a user defines loading and some constraints. He does believe that machine learning could make a big difference in CAD.
Lastly, Levi addresses sustainability, “I think sustainability is the future for the automotive industry. It has to be.” Rensselaer Motorsport is an electric vehicle (EV) team, so there is a large focus on sustainability. Levi believes that the entire automotive industry may be heading to EV, especially for racing. If companies can build a great EV race car, they can certainly build a great EV consumer vehicle. Levi adds that he’s seen interesting advances with fuel cells and that the industry will be powered by green sources of energy, and thus it is important for student teams to follow that industry trend and think about them in order to prepare for entering industry careers. “If we can develop engineers with that mindset and have experience already in where the industry is headed, we’re doing our students and our members a great service because we’re setting them up for what’s coming,” he concludes.
We close out the episode hearing about the Formula SAE competition itself, driving the car on Team Drive Day and hearing about their favorite Formula One teams such as Oracle Red Bull Racing, who we also had on the podcast to learn about how they use NX CAD for their championship-winning cars.
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