Shell Eco-marathon: Chassis and Steering
Shell Eco-marathon is a competition held every year where students from across the world try to complete a set race distance using the least amount of fuel possible. There are two categories of vehicles which can take part in the competition: Prototype and Urban.
Urban vehicles are representative of the cars commonly found on public roads, having common features such as four wheels, headlamps among others.
Prototype vehicles can be described as a more creative category where the regulations allow for more innovative designs that often go on to set new competition records.
For an entire year I acted as the Team leader for a group of four student engineers involved in a project to design, manufacture and test the chassis and steering system of a single-seater, ultra-high energy efficient vehicle to be entered into the Prototype class of the Shell Eco-marathon competition of 2020.
Steering
I was personally responsible for the development of the steering system solution.
My design, which was successfully manufactured and assembled onto the finished vehicle, optimised critical steering angles such as camber, toe, caster and kingpin axis inclination to improve the handling characteristics of the vehicle while minimising friction with the surface of the road.
Aluminium components and carbon fibre tubes were implemented in the design which also allowed adjustable camber and toe angles for further testing.
Carbon Fibre Chassis
The novel implementation of wet-layup processes for joining carbon fibre tubes as well as extensive stress analysis, iterative design and prototype testing resulted in a spaceframe chassis made entirely from carbon fibre which weighed only 2.25 kg.
The finished chassis successfully met all the strength goals set by the team, being tested to safely accommodate up to a 85 kg driver. The carbon fibre spaceframe chassis contributed to an overall vehicle mass reduction of 23% compared to the vehicle used for previous competitions.
