For the 2024 FSAE season, I held responsibility for our new vehicle’s hub design. A big focus for our team this year is to remove mass as much as possible across our vehicle, in order to compensate for our increased pack capacity. This capacity increase lead to resizing of most major suspension components compared to previous years.

I used ANSYS Mechanical to complete static structural and fatigue analyses for the hubs, both front and rear based off of contact patch loads. This included a baseline diagnostic of the suitability of previous years’ hubs with our current package. The new design is more structurally efficient in critical areas compared to previous years and shows a significant increase in camber stiffness.

Since our team is adopting a completely new architecture for the 2024 vehicle, I set a target of “infinite” life in an attempt to compensate for any surprise vehicle mass jumps. In future years it is a target for the team to design machined components to a well defined, finite lifetime based off of test data ideally acquired during this year’s competition and testing season.