Clemson Formula SAE Team

Clemson Formula SAE is a student-run organization dedicated to the enrichment of the Clemson students’ education by offering one of the best ways to apply what they learn in class. From engineering to marketing, computer programming to graphic design, CUFSAE has something to offer for every student.  We aim to provide students with the tools to learn as much as they can while exploring the possibilities of employment in the automotive industry. Our team strives to emulate the practices of the best race teams from around the world in order to be a top Formula SAE competitor. Located in the Ravenel Center of Clemson University, our shop is only a couple miles from the main campus. The team works closely with several departments of the university, including the Mechanical Engineering Department, College of Engineering and Science, Facilities Department, and Graphic Communications Department in order to complete our goals.

President/Team Leader

During the 2016-2017 season, I learned the ropes from my best friend, Nick Vasuta. Watching him work with others, seeing his dynamic, his drive, and his character gave me someone I could aspire to be. After shadowing Nick for the 2016-17 season, I was elected to be the Team Leader for the 2017-18 season.

With the knowledge we gained by keeping the 2016 car very similar to the 2015 car, we were ready to hit the ground running and begin to innovate on top of the team’s previous achievement. So, we decided to move from 13” wheels to 10” wheels and add a full aerodynamics package. Well, we did it. For the first time in our team’s history, we arrived at FSAE Michigan with not only a working car but a ground-up redesign. Also, our team competed in every static and dynamic event. The pitfall of the competition was our front wing mounts failing and our car being black-flagged during endurance. This drastically hurt our overall performance in the competition and we ended up finishing 85th of 120 teams. Looking back, making two enormous changes at the same time wasn’t the smartest; but if we did not take this leap we would not be where we are in terms of knowledge and development.

For me, this season was especially challenging outside the major changes we made to the car. As team lead, I organized and maintained the team, presided over team meetings, coordinated team resources, oversaw the general progress of the design and build of the Formula SAE car, created and maintained team structure in a fashion conducive to the timely completion of the team goals, and was the chief of team communications as well as the chief purchasing agent for the team. On top of my schoolwork, I worked 20-30 hours each week as a freelance AutoCAD draftsman for an electrical contractor in Charlotte, NC. Thankfully I had an amazing team around me who helped finish tasks when I had to travel to Charlotte for a meeting or had class.

Regardless of how challenging this season was, seeing the team grow and prosper was absolutely worth every sleepless night. Following this season I started my first internship at Tesla and had to pass the torch to the next generation since I could not properly lead the team from California. This not only gave me the ability to teach others but having the experience of leading a team of students to design and build a car from the ground up gave me insight into what to do differently, and these points were immensely useful for the next leaders.

Sponsorship Coordinator

For the 2018-19 season, I was the sponsorship coordinator for the team. My experience as Team Leader in 2017-18 gave me the ability to coordinate, communicate, and build relationships with multiple companies as a means of funding the Formula SAE team. Put simply, without sponsorship, our team would not exist.

During this season, I had the pleasure of working with several great companies to coordinate events and manage relationships between the two parties. After receiving this role I merged the marketing and sponsorship roles so that one person would manage the outward appearance of the team on social media, the website, etc. In 2016, Nick Vasuta and I designed the website, and I have maintained it after he graduated. The same goes for social media.

One of the major things I did as the sponsorship coordinator was redesign the sponsorship brochure. Nick set it up very well, but I reworked it to more strongly give back to the top tier sponsors of our team. Even the sponsors in the lower tiers gave positive feedback regarding this change.

Suspension Design/Simulation/Testing

Since I joined the team my freshman year, I have been a member of the suspension division. Put simply, our job is to keep the tires in their peak operating conditions. If all goes well the tires are the only things that touch the ground and as such, they’re the most important aspects of the vehicle. All forces and moments in some form travel through or are generated by the tires. In one way or another, my projects on this team have revolved around the tires and properly modeling their interactions with the vehicle.

Upright, Control Arm, Steering box, etc design

I have designed the uprights on the past two vehicles, Tiger21 and Tiger 22. The function of the upright assembly is to provide a physical connection from the wheels to the suspension links and to provide mounting and installation for the brake caliper. In the case of the current design, it also provides a means of adjustment to the suspension parameters such as camber, toe, and steering Ackerman geometry. Working on these designs has allowed me to further my knowledge of parametric modeling, FEA simulation, and compliance. To model these uprights I used SolidWorks as the 3D modeling software and ANSYS as the FEA tool. If you’d like to learn more about this project, please click here.

For the previous vehicle (Tiger 21) we attempted to utilize a bevel gear steering box design and I was made the design lead on this project. This project came as a result of steering kinematic design error, and unfortunately, the problem was realized too late in the build process for us to take the proper steps to fix the issue. So, since using two individual u-joints would not work the idea was to reduce the weight and slop of the steering system by implementing a miter gear steering box design. The design was put through several rounds of review, but unfortunately, the miter gears failed due to a large amount of compliance in our steering column support which caused binding and eventually failure in the steering box.

This design was followed up by a steel plate box to support a double u-joint. This again went through several rounds of design review and is our current solution for our steering column. The double u-joint allows for more freedom of movement and does not bind with the amount of compliance in the steering column support induced by our drivers.

Tires

Tires are one of my favorite things to study and work with on a vehicle. I love how complex they are and how much research is required to even begin to understand their complexities. For the team, I have developed a Pacejka Magic Formula Fitting scheme and have made it robust enough to accept most of the raw tire data from the Tire Testing Consortium (TTC). If you’d like to read more about my experience working with tires, please click here.

Testing and Development

The 2018-19 season represents a bold change in strategy for the team, as we expanded the length of a project cycle from one to two years. This is based on the understanding that no amount of design work can make up for finishing a vehicle early and having time to test extensively before competition. The opportunity to fix issues and optimize setups ensures both reliability and high performance. This has been experienced by the team, as every year vehicle performance and reliability continue to improve long after FSAE Michigan.

The goal of the two-year plan is to capitalize on the improvement that comes to the vehicles over the year since their completion. Previously, a vehicle cycle includes design, construction, and competition over the course of a year. With the two year plan, the vehicle undergoes the same yearlong process of development and construction before going to compete at either FSAE Lincoln or North (an important step for critical mid-cycle feedback). The following year, while the development of the new car begins, the existing car undergoes a season of testing, tuning, and regional competitions, before finishing the project cycle with FSAE Michigan (the major North American FSAE event). The day to day operations of the team remains largely unaffected by the overlapping cycles. Every year the team designs and builds a new car while testing the car built the previous year. This will not change. The greatest challenges that come with this plan are the logistical requirements to go to two FSAE events every year, as well as the transfer of knowledge as designers graduate before their car competes at Michigan. The team is actively working towards securing funding for the former, and the latter can be mitigated with proper documentation of design tools and decisions. The addition of an entire year for testing, not only to improve performance but to validate design decisions, will ensure peak performance and the opportunity to maximize scores in both static and dynamic events come FSAE Michigan.

This testing gives us the ability to not only run steady-state and transient tests to hone the car’s performance, but it also gives us the ability to validate areas such as our aerodynamics and powertrain packages on our car before FSAE Michigan. My main role in this has been using simulation data and past on-track knowledge to inform testing/tuning of the dampers and tires. Some of this development for last year’s car was completed with the engineers at Öhlins in Hendersonville, NC on their 4-post shaker rig. Without the correlation made between simulation and testing coupled with the knowledge gained from the shaker rig, our car would not have been able to achieve 10th place in skidpad and 18th place overall at FSAE Michigan in 2019.