As the Chassis Section Lead for the '24-25 season, I am in charge of designing and building the tubular space-frame chassis that every other team section mounts their components to. In previous years, I was a contributing member to the Powertrain section in charge of engine development. Read about some of the systems I have designed on the team down below.

The main driving factors in the design of an FSAE chassis are rules requirements, stiffness, and weight. Using these constraints, I designed a minimum viable product that met the stringent safety requirements outlined in the rules and then iterated the design with other sections to increase stiffness and reduce weight by optimizing tube layout for more efficient component mounting. With this process, we yielded a 5% increase in stiffness, a 15% decrease in structural weight, and better driver visibilty compared to previous years. 

As a safety precaution, there are strict noise limits that FSAE cars must meet. Unfortunately, most off the shelf mufflers applied to engines greatly restrict the performance of the engine in order to meet legal requirements. To solve this problem, I designed a custom titanium muffler for our engine that meets all requirements for competition while providing very little restriction to our exhaust flow. Additionally, the resonator used in the system is precisely place to be used for exhaust scavenging in our tune to further increase engine performance. Combined, these additions contribute to an over 10% increase in the rated horsepower of our engine.

As our team uses a single-cylinder engine usually found in competition spec dirtbikes, one unfortunate side-effect is that it's crankshaft is unbalanced in the lateral direction and imparts excess vibrations into the chassis. Taking inspiration from the engine mounts found in OEM cars, I designed custom rubber dampers for our engine mounts. The design greatly reduced the fatigue experienced by our drivers and prevented vibrational fatigue failures of other car components that we faced in years prior.

In FSAE, engine power is restricted by the requirement of a 20 mm restriction in the intake pathway. This requirement causes a severe reduction in engine power and efficiency and helps level the playing field for the variety of engines used by teams. In order to regain lost power, we have worked around this restriction by optimizing restrictor geometry, post restriction plenum volume, and designing custom intake runners with billet machined bell mouths to increase flow velocity. Additionally, we are working on the design of a ram air intake to increase pre-restriction pressure to increase mass flow through the restrictor. These optimizations, combined with dyno tuning and the previously mentioned custom muffler, have allowed us to recover all of the lost performance from the added restriction and even gain performance over the oem configuration.