Introduction
During my Bachelor’s Degree I joined the Formula Student Electric Team for almost three years, taking on different roles throughout.
Year 1: Suspension
I started out in the suspension team, where we determined the desirable driving dynamics for the car and tried to fit the suspension layout to those as close as possible. In Formula Student and especially with our car at the time we had to work around the issue of having really short swing arms, which resulted in a high coupling between vertical wheel movement and wheel rotation around the cars longitudinal axis. To mitigate this effect as much as possible we ended up having to go quite far up with the upper swing arms mountings on the frame to create a parallel motion between both swing arms.
A special concern for the team at the team at the time was keeping manufacturing costs and effort low, because we were on a tight budget. I was tasked with designing the swing arms in CAD. To conform to all the requirements we had set I designed them to only consist of two rods and a milled piece, whicht could be manufactured on a 3-axis mill. Since there are no duplicate parts it was essential to have as little machining setup as necessary. During welding we learned, that it would made sense to weld the pieces on a rig, as the fit of the hot rolled rods and the holes in the parts were not accurate enough to ensure a good accuracy on the final dimensions.
Finally I conceptionalised the sway bar set up, which was introduced in that year. With the goal of easy manufacturing being the most important requirement, we went with a simple torsion bar setup, the ends of which can be seen in the picture below to the left of the dampers.
