December 17, 2014

Students find formula for racing ingenuity

Students design, build and race formula one style car for Australasian championship.

The UOW student racing team is among South East Asia’s top young auto engineers, following a top ten finish at the 2014 Formula SAE Australasia competition. 

The contest is an annual, international event hosted by the Society of Automotive Engineers Australaisa (SAE-A) where teams of undergraduate student engineers design, build and race an open wheel, formula-style race car.

The designs and construction skills were put to the test at the regional competition, held recently in Melbourne, where teams are pitted against other local and international entrants over four days in a series events and tests including design, cost, acceleration, one lap sprints and endurance.

Team UOW FSAE finished in tenth place out of 21 teams from universities in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, as well as a car built by a team from the Warsaw University of Technology in Poland.

The 2014 team improved on the previous year’s result of nineteenth place as a direct result of improving the design of the 2013 car.

Team business director Brett McAulay said the result was satisfying considering the high standards.

“With a whole new management team, and many new faces on the design team, it was always going to be a significant challenge,” he added. “The vast improvement occurred despite of a surprisingly strong field of competitors and can be attributed to the hard effort in design and manufacture in order to create a highly reliable, yet competitive racecar.”

The team finished every event, with a fifth placing in the autocross event the highlight.

Team principal Matt Athanasios (pictured above) said that at the start of the build the team set out to identify and resolve mechanical and reliability issues that arose in 2013.

“Limiting the amount of new design reduced the scope of the design process and ensured that we could learn the most from the car through an extended period of testing and tuning,” Matt said.

The key design improvements included redesigning the chassis, reshaping the aerodynamic wings, a new intake design to provide more balanced power output, as well as a the first one-piece carbon fibre nose cone on a UOW-built car.

Part of the air intake system (plenum) was built using 3D printing technology, the shape of which was not possible to build using conventional methods.

Over the course of close to 12 months the students managed and run project provided valuable experience in teamwork, critical decision-making, budget management, engineering techniques, and hands-on manufacturing of a high-performance racing car.

“We have about 50 core team members looking after technical and business systems,” Matt said. “We have managers for every system, for example, engine chassis aerodynamics and so on. We also have a business director, a finance manager as well as media and PR managers.

“Most of the team are engineering students, given it’s primarily a design and build competition, but for the 2014 campaign we’ve brought in new members from other faculties such as law, sciences, health sciences and from the arts.”

To date UOW Formula SAE teams have had nine podium finishes out of the 16 competitions entered, including three outright victories, putting it in the top 10 per cent of teams worldwide.

“It’s a very rewarding project,” Matt added. “You start with a concept, even sometimes a dream in January, and in early December you see the car in front of you and that’s a special moment.”