Busy Day At The Shop!

Today is shaping up to be one of our most productive days of the semester and it feels great. We've had about 20 members in and out of the shop throughout the day working on various projects and a lot has gotten done. We have an anticipated first drive date of March 2nd, which is just one week away. The team has been working vigorously in order to meet its goal. Here are some highlights from the variety of projects that are being welded, chopped, shaped and designed behind the doors of our shop.

In this next photo, you'll see senior Dave Golden putting the final touches on his pedal box. Designed in Solidworks and crafted from steel, this year's box will be extremely light, coming in at around 5lbs. and considerably stronger than previous iterations.

Here you'll see president Sam Putney working with Freshman Kyle Pollard as they make inserts out of aluminum on our shop lathe.

Here, freshman Larry Oligny is making some fine adjustments with the bench grinder.

One project that we are particularly excited to make progress on is our drivers seat. Here you can see our lightweight aluminum seat pan which had been cut and bent in-house. Soon its joints will be welded and we'll send it over to a local business called Ecovative Design who has graciously offered to construct our seat-support material from their patented fungus-based foam material.

In these next two photos, you'll see our differential hangers which were designed by vice president Liam Mooney and cut in-house from aluminum. This year we will be running a limited slip differential which is currently being built for us by an outside vender. Following the two photos of the diff hangars, you'll see VP Liam himself working with our impact attenuator material on the CAD software, Solidworks. 

An exciting delivery that we got in the mail this week is a soda-can sized turbocharger from Garrett Turbochargers. Senior Dresdan Gordon (in green) has been spearheading the forced induction project on the team and has done hours of calculations to prove the benefits of the tiny turbocharger. The next challenge for Dresdan will be fitting the turbo and building the intake restrictor which is mandatory for forced induction vehicles in the Formula Hybrid competition.

The electrical team, led by junior Caleb Cook-Kollars, (in brown) has been working furiously to make headway on the car's CAN BUS communication system. The CAN system is made up of a network of small chips which will be placed throughout the car. The chips have the ability to perform functions and collect data from their respective areas. The network, which will act like a nervous system for our car, will allow for wireless, real-time, data acquisition. This will prove to be an invaluable asset during the testing and tuning of our car.

Our all-aluminum fuel tank is finally completely bent and welded together. 

Finally, one last-minute change that we had to make in order to comply with this year's competition rules is in our battery placement. In previous iterations of our car, we carried our batteries in an aluminum box on the side of the car. In-fact, our chassis was originally designed with this configuration in mind. However, this year's rule book stipulates that the batteries must exist within the structural frame of the car, so we decided to move the batteries from the side of the car to beneath the driver. In the next four photos, you'll see our battery box, which was built by president Sam Putney out of a durable plastic material called kydex.

Thanks for checking in and be sure to look for our weekly updates. 

Day Trip at Saratoga Auto Musuem

Last Saturday was a great experience for Rensselaer Formula Hybrid. We gave a presentation at the Saratoga Auto Museum (http://saratogaautomuseum.org/rpi-tech-sessions/). Sam Putney, Liam Mooney, Taylor Scicchitano, and Ricky Willems talked about our race car this year, team dynamics, hybrid race cars and hybrid technology. Although there wasn't a very large crowd, it was very useful practice for both the business presentation and design presentation at competition.

The team in front of the FSAE exhibit at Saratoga Auto Museum

Also a lot of fun was touring the museum was the team. It was cool to see awesome super cars and classic automobiles. Seeing different car builds, such as unique suspension systems, aqua cars, and frames was useful experience to bring to our design.

Buckle up for GT5

Outreach is something that would really benefit the team, and after this successful event, we will definitely try to Education and team building all in one. Good times.

Feeling the Buurn

It's been very busy in the shop recently. We've worked a lot on a timeline and calendar to keep us on track, and our goal is still to drive the Blue Heron for the first time this year on March 2nd (and every other weekend thereafter). We'll be driving it on North Lot on campus, so thankfully we don't need a trailer. However RPI is requiring us to have Fire Extinguisher Training, so they've set up a class for us next week. We'll let you know how much they can teach us in a hour about fire extinguishers...

Anyways, many parts have been ordered recently, including a backup motor controller, and a lot of parts are being waterjet cut. Everybody has been working on individual projects and it's great watching all the subsystems come together into a complete race car.

Dresdan welding the gas tank designed by Kyle

Today during our task meeting our new polos came in! Which meant a great photo shoot opportunity....

Just look at these guys.

Andy got cut out but I swear he was there!

We've also gotten a couple new members this semester, including Sanju (far right) who is joining Alex on the composites team, as well as Rusty (third from right) who is working on the steering column.

All in all, it's a great time to be in Rensselaer Formula Hybrid

Pedal Box and Other Progress

Things are going pretty well for us this season so far.  We have made much progress on the car and the first iteration is on track to be ready for testing by March 2nd.  Despite all of the good things that have carried over from last year, we hit some snags this year with rules that were changed from 2012.

The most pressing rule change was the addition of legs to the PERCY driver template as well as a rule stating that cars will not be able to run if PERCY doesn't fit.  Our previous pedal box did not provide enough legroom to fit PERCY, so a redesign was necessary.

On the pedal box for this year, the master cylinders are oriented in front of the pedals, instead of the conventional layout of behind the pedals.  This was done to move the pedal faces forward toward the front bulkhead as far as possible and provide the most legroom possible with our chassis.

The box and pedals are constructed entirely out of 14 gauge cold rolled steel that has been cut on the RPI water jet and TIG welded into box frame shapes.  This allows for a stiff, lightweight design that complies with all Formula Hybrid Competition rules.

Each pedal features adjustable positive stops to tune the pedal travel for optimum operation and driver feedback. The throttle travel and rest position can be adjusted for optimum heel-toe placement.

This current box is about a half pound lighter than the box from last year, and most importantly, it allows us to fit PERCY and pass technical inspection.

In other news, we received an exciting new shipment last night.  Our new engine came in!  We can now have one engine on the engine dyno for tuning and EFI testing purposes and one to use in the car for dynamic testing.

And, speaking of EFI testing, we now have our ECOTRONS EFI system working and running properly.  With a new wiring harness and some diagnostics and troubleshooting, we were able to fix a few issues that we had last year.  We plan to use this setup on our March 2nd test date.  Look for updates coming soon as projects are completed and subsystems are installed.

Dave Golden

Goals Outline for Car Version 3.5

      With Car 3.0 through inspection at the 2012 competition, we kicked off the 2013 school year knowing we had a solid platform to work on. With much of the team's leadership and most experienced members having graduated just after the 2012 competition, we were also confident that the fully functional car 3.0 would provide an excellent learning tool for new and younger members. On car 3.0, these less experienced team members can see complete and working examples of the types of systems that need to be designed and improved upon in 2013 and the years to come.

      Shown below is a video taken during the team's Navigation Rensselaer and Beyond event, at which we demonstrated the race car to a group of incoming freshmen.

This video was taken shortly after the electric motor drive was converted from v-belt drive to chain drive. As seen at the beginning of the video the car was quite able to drive on electric-only power because of this. With the conversion complete, that made this driving session our first real session on full hybrid power. If compared to the videos taken at the 2012 competition and during testing in April 2012, it is easy to see that the car performs better in this video.

      However, throughout testing in the fall, new challenges were presented while issues we'd experienced before continued to haunt us. Considering the risk of damaging systems the we planned to reuse in 2013, we disassembled the car earlier than planned for and began work on a new bench-top dynamometer in early October. I hope to have another post up soon detailing progress on the dyno and engine-tuning.

      Aside from our work to overcome these unexpected challenges, work has also continued toward innovation on last year's systems, as planned out in our mission to spend two years on one car. During the fall semester a senior capstone team, consisting of several RPI hybrid team members as well as others, focused their design project on a new limited-slip differential for our car. Building on the internals of our LSD from Car 2.0, a new, lightweight housing was designed and fabricated to accommodate two sprockets in the same configuration as on our spool. At the end of the fall semester, the differential was being tested on a custom rig designed by the capstone team. I hope to have a post designated to the new differential up soon, and we all look forward to putting it in the car on February 3rd.

     With thanks to our awesome crew of new members and our new mechanical team leadership (Dave Golden and Dresdan Gordon), we have also seen a ton of progress on other systems, particularly the shifter, pedal box, battery box, dashboard, EFI, and CAN bus system among other things. There have been many exciting developments in these systems and fabrication is about to begin for all these projects, so we hope to have some photos and details coming soon! (I'd give you a sneak peak of the pedal box, but first some issue regarding my Solidworks licensing needs to be investigated further).

TTFN,
Sam'l Putney
RPI Hybrid President

2012 Competition and Year Sum Up

RPI Formula Hybrid 2011-2012 year ended very strongly. We brought out race car to the competition at New Hampshire Motor Speedway from April 30th-May 3rd.
Despite all our planning, a couple things still happened last minute. Our pneumatic shifter was swapped for a manual slapstick shifter because we were concerned with the tank capacity of the pneumatic system.

After a few touch-ups we were able to pass mechanical tech inspection but we had a few problems with the electrical systems. Eventually, multiply convoys were sent in every direction to find us a specific DC fuse and we pass electrical tech too.

Sam Putney holding on during the Tilt Test

Michael Kessler completing the Brake Test

The Albatross stands triumphantly after passing the Rain Test and all inspections

When we completed the rest of the inspections, it was RPI Formula Hybrid's first time ever competing in a dynamic event when we took part of the Endurance Race. The first half of the endurance was strong; we even overtook a few other schools, but we started having engine problems during the second half. The race ended when we ran out of gas, but nonetheless when the points were tallied we placed 7th!

Tony Peto ripping around the course during the Endurance race

The whole team at the end of the competition

Thank everyone so much for the support! We are very happy with the results and look forward to the future we will go from here.

Tech Park Testing

 Last Saturday we tested the car at Pitney Bowes in the Rensselaer Tech Park.

 There were a few hiccups in the car - our starter battery and air shifter weren't working. The motor belt was slipping too, but we were able to run the car anyways. Check out the pictures!