Bottom Panel Reinforcements Design Discussion

Owned by Tommy Tran
Last updated: Mar 17, 2021
2 min read

Purpose:

To clearly define the goals and requirements of the bottom panel (BP) based on the latest design and situation of the vehicle.

Meeting Agenda:

  1. Clearly outline the current situation of the BP and the recent design decisions made, e.g. the BP reinforcements cured during December 2020.

  2. Discuss Options

  3. Discuss dependencies, impact, and implications of the role of the BP in the whole vehicle

  4. Discuss and finalize the final vehicle design

  5. Discuss and finalize the standard or quality of the BP required to meet the intended vehicle design

    1. Decide what factors are important to its “structural” status

    2. Testing? How do we evaluate and compare w/ sims.

  6. Steps and actions needed to verify that BP reaches intended vehicle design standards with SF

 

1. Current Status

Reinforcements were made to the hood, mid, and trunk sections of the car. See reasoning here

  • Expired Prepreg

    • Prof. Montesano said you can use expired prepreg to get the correct properties, but it wouldn’t be guaranteed

  • Weird geometry of carbon fibre

  • Early MS14 hoped to make test specimens or full (smaller) parts and do destructive testing to help extrapolate quality of the intended structural BP.

  • Formula Electric does torsion testing on the Chassis to see that its stiffness is similar to what was simulated

2. Discuss Options

 

Approach

Requirements

Pros

Cons

Approach

Requirements

Pros

Cons

Evaluate strength of current BP and work from there

Need to establish a non-destructive method of testing BP and also have a high confidence in the numbers

Simulate this then apply a high SF?

 

What if the BP breaks during non-destructive testing?

Completely ignore BP and reinforce Chassis using only Chassis tubes

 

 

 

Try to reinforce BP to play a structural role in the Chassis

Figure out areas that are feasible

 

 

Why we want the BP structural:

 

Why we don’t want the BP structural:

  1. If there are a minimal amount of chassis tubes required to pass Regs, then we don’t need to dive deeper into this discussion and details about how to make the BP structural.

 

 

Action Items:

Task

Reason

Due Date

Task

Reason

Due Date

@Tommy Tran needs to run the numbers to get a final number of tubes required.

Helps make the final decision about whether pursuing BP reinforcements is necessary at all.

Saves time and cost if BP is not required to be structural.

Sunday March 21

Have a follow up meeting after the numbers have been found to have more decisive decision making @Catherine Cai

 

 

 

Questions

  1. Could side panels be added to design to break and reduce the vehicle collision impact

    1. toughness - has energy that breaks the part during plastic deformation

    2. charpy impact test

    3. yes