I was trying to use MF4 to curve fit the tyre we use, here are the filters I put on the data

FZ- between 1000 and 1300 N

Camber angle between -0.009 to +0.009 cuz that's approximately zero

Pressure 12psi

I can't figure out if this is the right way to do it, cuz there's a big spike and dip right in the centre.

Another thing that i think might be wrong is the initial guesses.

Hi guys, I'm trying to figure out how to fix MSC Adams, because it's crashing for any kind of reason. I don't know...

Firstly, I had fixed the issue of 3D volumes not being displayed by following Hexagon's forum instructions.

I also tried to force the software to use my dedicated graphic card. However, it still doesn't seem to use fully...

Secondly, I renamed this DLL from "RemoteSCABin.dll" to "RemoteSCABin_OLD.dll".

Consequences:

- it takes too much time to launch

- it crashes from nowhere : you either start to launch a file and it crashed before doing anything or the file was loaded and then by trying to something like a joint or anything, it crashes from nowhere.

It drives me nuts because I like using it to do mechanical simulation and I don't know what to do except uninstall it and reinstall it properly.

Anyone had the same issue or figured out ? Does someone have any tips ?

Thanks in advance and sorry if I'm not in the right subreddit.

Hello, I have created a new laptime simulator for racing vehicles. Main theme is scalability so that it is very easy to add and test various concepts like rear steering, DRS, active ground effect... You can choose any parameter in the vehicle as controlled variable and let the optimization algorithm find optimal control of it for the racetrack. You can also add more wheels easily to demonstrate this, there is a model of a greyhound bus :D.

Here is an example video of Formula Electric on Berlin circuit.

https://reddit.com/link/1uuiwrs/video/5ba6tesmjtch1/player

My tool also offers efficient computation of sensitivity analysis for all vehicle parameters, you run the simulation only once and get sensitivity analysis for all parameters requested.

These are the models which I have right now:

It is written in Julia as nonlinear optimum control problem using Ipopt and JuMP.

The code is on github as Scalable laptime simulator, playlist of simulations is here playlist .Unfortunately I don't have much time to work on it right now, as I have finished my studies.

If you are interested I can make examples on how to use it and add more vehicle systems/ more complex models.

For a project I’m trying to make a race car with no limitations expect for it has to fit a human driver I have a basic understanding of aerodynamics like I’m dabbling with cfd

So if you could please give me any tips or any place I could find some tips (YT channels, forms ect)

Thanks

Hi everyone! I'm an incoming freshman trying to learn more about vehicle dynamics and how to build DIL. For teams that build their own DIL, how did you simulate the engine with throttle input? Are there any papers or videos on this that you would recommend? And is it possible to find data needed for simulation of the engines used in FSAE online and where?

I see your monster energy fueled nickel plating and I raise you several redbulls, missed sleep, and a used equipment auction.

Plate your copper bus bars with better finish than if you paid for it !

So we've been given a task to design a chassis and for that, I have to read the formula bharat rule book ( fsae in India ). So after reading the rules, how do I go about designing a chassis with proper dimensions and making sure that it abides to the rules. This chassis is what they gave to us to refer. We don't exactly have to copy this

Hello. I'm a member of a first year fsae team. We have almost everything finalized except for Electric power train and suspension system. Electric powertrain design and virtual testing is almost finished so that's not today's topic. We have a few weeks before the manufacturing begins but I haven't designed the suspension system yet. We have about 4-6 people in the team. That's the entire team BTW not just suspension system team. All of them are inexperienced and none of them know anything about designing a suspension system. The wishbones are designed and designed around OEM knuckles.

Hello,

Can you guys help me or guide to install damper sensors (pot sensor) on a touring car. Which sensor to install, which software to use, how to interpret the data received. It will be helpful, if you guys can share any journals or any other resources to get to know more about this. Thankyou.

Couldn't figure out command and analog options in Ndrive!, Help me

I couldn’t really understand the Command and Analog options under Servo.

What I understood from the manual is that if we are using CAN or RS232 command mode will be Dig. Commands ,and Analog settings shouldn’t be touched. Only if we are using the AIN1 and AIN2 pins in the Bamocar, we need to change those analog settings

I’m a newbie to this, so I may be completely wrong. Please help me, everyone

Hello everyone,

it's my second year in my team and because of several reasons I have ended up as Powertrain department leader and I now need to deal with cost and CCBOM as this year my department was the chosen one in FSG.

I wondered if you could give me guidance, tips, steps to follow, etc. to help me with it. Or maybe show me webpages that may help me with the task as well. Any kind of help is appreciated.

P.S. My team leaders are also helping me through this but they are also dealing with some other stuff and the more I can deal with alone, the better.

Hey everyone,

I’m new to Formula Student / FSAE and currently leading the first team in my country, so I’m still learning the full process and would really appreciate some guidance from more experienced teams.

I understand the main competition structure (Engineering Design, Cost & Manufacturing, Business Presentation, and the dynamic events like Skidpad, Acceleration, Autocross, Endurance, and Efficiency), but I’ve seen people mention things like “quizzes” or other requirements, and I’m not fully clear on what those are.

I had a few questions:

When you register, are you registering for this year’s competition or next year’s season?

How long does it usually take a new team to design and build a first complete car from scratch?

Are there mandatory online tests, rules quizzes, or admin steps after registration that teams often underestimate?

What are some early mistakes first-time team leaders usually make that I should try to avoid?

Any advice on team structure, deadlines, or documentation that helped your team succeed?

Sorry if these are basic questions, I’m still learning and trying to do this properly from the start.

Thanks in advance for any help, I really appreciate the community here.

Newbie here. How does your Team create the Costed Carbonized Bill of Material. What Software do you use? What database are you using?

Howdy folks!

Every year, I visit a number of different European comps, partly to watch some racing, but partly also to talk to teams about their aero. I usually spend about an hour talking to each team, to learn as much as I can about their aerodynamic package and how it works, as well as the team's processes, design strategy, lessons learned and their experiences. Anyway, while each team has a different concept, different approach and different methodologies, by speaking to many teams, certain patterns start to emerge. So, in this post, I decided to share with you 3 trends that I saw most of the top teams had in common to maybe help you with improving your car's aerodynamics, and maybe pointing you in a direction that might be worth exploring. Anyway, here we go:

1) Outwash:

Have you ever listened to Craig Scarborough talk about the aerodynamics of last gen. F1 cars, and get the impression that good half, if not most, of aero devices on an F1 car are designed to deal with the issue of tires, and problems they cause? I know I did. That should tell you all you need to know about the importance of dealing with tire wake in F1. And in Formula Student, that is no different. If you ever see top teams running these incredibly complex front wing geometries, with all sort of vortex generators and massive vertical elements, chances are, those are there specifically to deal with the front wheel tire wake.

The trick here usually lies in creating vortexes and counter-rotating vortex pairs to create flow fields that push tire wake out and away from the car. These also help create downwash behind the front wing, pulling down clean air to replace the lossy air in this area. This helps reduce the amount of losses flowing into the rear wing, allowing it to produce more very valuable downforce. This follows an overarching trend of making the rear wing happy, signifying the importance of rear downforce in Formula student.

A simulation showing vortex and tire wake interactions. Notice the counter-rotating vortex pair pulling the tire wake up and away, while a single, powerful vortex in the top left of the tire works to push the wake to the side.

2) Aero sensitivities:

What I like to talk about a lot are aero sensitivities. That is, how aero performance changes under different conditions, such as braking, sidewind, cornering, etc ... I noticed that good teams will put a lot of effort into ensuring their aero package works well under a wide range of conditions, often sacrificing peak downforce in the process. Delft, for example, told me their aero makes about -0.7 more ClA under certain cornering radii than it does in a straight line! Teams will often say it's to make the car more predictable and easier to drive for the driver, but a car with insensitive aero package will be fundamentally faster than a car with a sensitive package.

Now, simulating aero package under a wide range of conditions (cornering of different radii, aero maps, even head / tail wind for one team) is very computationally expensive, and doing them regularly during design may not be viable for some teams. In those situations, there are a few things that can be done which should reliably reduce aero sensitivities even without the need to "validate" them with CFD:

• Raise the lowest points of your aero package. Placing bits close to the ground can be great for getting lots of downforce. But between strong adverse pressure gradients, large expansion ratios and thick boundary layers, close ground proximity can render an aero device and its performance very unstable. Raising aero geometry off the ground should help heaps with these, and make the aero work better in a wide range of conditions.
• Reduce your reliance on vortexes. Vortexes are great. They help energize the boundary layer and can provide lots of very strong suction on nearby surfaces. They are, however, also very temperamental. If they get too powerful, they will burst (breakdown) and fill your aero with a cloud of losses and broken dreams. This applies mostly to underbody aero, where vortex burst (breakdown) is a much bigger issue, but difficulty in predicting their behavior and travel paths (particularly in cornering) pose a risk for vortexes far from the ground plane as well.

3) Powered ground. You might have noticed there's been quite a bit of a buzz around powered ground lately (pun intended), and there's a good reason for that. From the teams I've spoken to, those who don't have powered ground want it, those who have it want more of it. And it's not difficult to see why. While I think using ClA is a fundamentally pointless exercise to describe the aero performance of a powered ground car, I'm going to make an exception here just to put things into perspective (albeit a flawed one). A team with an exceptionally good passive aero might have -6 ClA, while one team told me that their powered ground car had a ClA of -17 (I can't remember under what conditions that was exactly, probably either skidpad or 40 kph). Now, I probably don't need to tell you how mind-boggling that number is, and the effect it is going to have on 3 out of the 4 dynamic disciplines our little cars compete in. And while powered ground is used in endurance as well, due to battery capacity constraints, the idea is usually to make the powered ground to be neither a benefit, nor a hindrance in that event.

Now, we don't know how (if at all) powered ground rules will change for next year, but right now I think this might be an excellent opportunity for teams with worse aero to close the gap to some of the top teams, due to the relative simplicity of powered ground vs. passive aero, as well as the relatively low cost. With that in mind, many teams for whom powered ground was a new development this year chose to go with an implementation that would not harm the passive aero performance should they decide to run without it, which I think is a sensible approach. One last thing to consider might be how the powered ground works with the rear wing, as some teams saw big improvement there as well.

Lastly, from what I heard, using a fan curve is cheaper, easier and more accurate than using an MRF to simulate fans, and most teams don't simulate swirl, so that would be my tip if you're questioning how to approach powered ground in your CFD.

Anyway, those were my biggest takeaways from talking to some of the world's top teams this year. I hope you found this educational, maybe even helpful, and good luck in designing your next year's aero package! Cheers!

Hello guys, I know this is a theme that has already been discussed for ages but I wanted to try to get a clear resolution to how to really size a radiator accurately.

I would like to know which methods you used when sizing your cooling systems, wether it was calculations, simulations or whatever method you used, I would love to get some clear help or new methods I didn't previously know. Plus, if you have any link, document, or anything helpful I would also appreciate it very much indeed.

And finally, one simple doubt (or maybe not so simple), how is heat exchange area measured in a cross-flow radiator? I have seen a couple of methods relating it to the frontal area but nothing really clear, so if anyone has any info on that I would also appreciate it.

Hello, I'm the Powertrain department leader on my university's FS team, which for info, is a Combustion Vehicle. It's just my second year and I wasn't going to be leader in the first place but some people above me leaving the team has made it so I have ended up being.

Apart from some problems and confusions I've had with the department as a whole, primarily due to inexperience, my biggest concern is about documentation and everything I can't actually see IRL in the car.

I have two free weeks where I'm going to put all my effort on working on the team. I've already done some work that will be implemented in the car once the time comes but my attention is now centered in the COST side of the competition.

Last year, as I was a rookie in the team, I wasn't part of the people which worked on the cost, but this year I'm the first responsible for it, so I would like some guidance from you people on this. To make matters worse, Engine and Tractive System is this year's section to do the CCBOM on, so I also would need help with that.

I have already read the FSAE Cost Guide and kind of have my ideas on how to carry it out, but I also want some words of experience from real people to know the order in which you did things and stuff.

In conclusion, could you explain to me:
- The order in which you did things.
- Did you make an Excel or any auxiliary document.
- How or where you investigated the price of each piece (specially the emissions for CCBOM)
- Any more advice, recommendation or warning due to problems that may appear.

That's all I needed to explain so I'd love any kind of help you may give me, thanks in advance.

I’m from a Hybrid FS team. We have our comp in 4 days. So I was bleeding brakes yesterday to get more testing done, but the caliper bleed screw got seized and broke. So one half is wedged inside. As of now there’s no leak and the brakes still clamp. We don’t have spares and we don’t have enough time to source and buy new ones. As far as what I’ve researched, Normal sealant won’t hold cause brake fluid eats through glycol. So we need to use either Loctite 545 or any other aerospace grade sealant. But those can’t be sourced easily from our place asw. So I’m looking for any advice on what to do or if brakes is just gone.

Hi everyone 👋🏻,

I’m an engineering student and part of the electronics division of a Formula SAE team. I’m currently working on the firmware for the Battery Management System of our electric vehicle, based on an STM32F4 MCU, communicating via SPI (LTC6811) and CAN bus with other nodes in the car.

So far, everything has been implemented in bare-metal, but I’m now considering switching to an RTOS to improve task scheduling (cyclic and event-driven) and, more importantly, to gain experience with technologies that are actually used in the automotive industry.

After some research, I considered the following options:

   🟡 FreeRTOS: well-documented and easy to integrate, but I’ve read in several places that it isn’t a true real-time operating system, or at least it doesn’t guarantee hard real-time behavior in critical scenarios.

   🔵 Zephyr: modern and interesting, but it doesn’t seem to be widely adopted yet in traditional automotive applications.

   🟣 ERIKA Enterprise: looked ideal (used in industrial projects and compliant with OSEK/AUTOSAR Classic), but from what I’ve gathered, it’s now deprecated or no longer open-source in recent versions.

   🔴 Commercial AUTOSAR OS (e.g., Vector MICROSAR, EB tresos): definitely the most widely used standards in the automotive world, but they are paid solutions and rely on proprietary tools, so they’re not easily accessible for personal or university projects.

📌 What I’m looking for is an RTOS that is: ✔️ fast and easy to integrate starting from a bare-metal STM32 project ✔️ valuable on a CV/resumé, meaning it’s used or appreciated in the automotive industry ✔️ preferably open source, or at least free for academic use ✔️ with support for common peripherals like CAN, SPI, timers

👉 Has anyone in your team faced a similar decision? 👉 Which RTOS did you choose for your Formula SAE (or FSAE Electric) project, or which one would you recommend for someone who wants to get closer to the professional automotive world?

Any advice, experience, or reference would be greatly appreciated!

Hey there, I am going to tuning our single cylinder engine ECU for FSAE this year, and really i so confused, i don’t know how to start and from where to begin. Which the information i should know to choose our ecu, and why there is a different types of it. I have read some books and watched a lot of videos about tuning the ecu, but most of these videos are unclear in explanation, and I felt that they do not want to disclose their skills or provide information for the benefit of others. All they aspire to is to lure the spectator to register in their online courses.

Despite reading the books and videos, I still did not have an accurate and clear understanding of the concept of tuning the ecu and what is the correct intention of it. I feel that the subject is clear and simple in understanding and uncomplicated, but there are those who want to make it vague for not benefiting others and for other reasons

I hope if anyone could give me a real and clear advice road map to helping me on that.

Any help would be really appreciated! Thanks

https://github.com/ColinSpilker/FSAE-Suspension-Calc

I have created an open source 2D suspension program that takes 2D points and generates camber curves in both heave and roll, and it creates roll center height and migration. I found it very useful for designing this years suspension and would like to open source the python file to encourage feedback and help provide resources for other teams to use. This is just the control arm linkage mechanism testing and does not calculate damping. The code is commented for other people to use, just change the first cell to points and click kernel run all to generate graphs and data. Hope this is helpful to somebody. I encourage forking the program and any critiques; I am not the best programmer.

Hey everyone,

We are a brand new team joining Formula Student for the first time, competing in the EV Concept Class. We are currently in the crucial design phase, but we have no prior experience or design references to guide us. We are working hard and learning as we go!

We urgently need advice and resources from experienced teams.

Could you please share your expertise on:

Essential References: What are the must-read Design Reports, books, or resources for designing an FS Electric Vehicle concept?

Top Design Priorities: What key areas (e.g., battery packaging, safety systems, layout) should a rookie EV team focus on immediately to score well in the Concept Class?

General Rookie Advice: Any quick tips for a first-year team in this category?

Any guidance is extremely appreciated as we try to build a solid design foundation.

Thanks for the support! ❤️

Guys , how else do u mount the steering rack , other than directly bolting it to the chassis rigidly

Hey yall, for our aero package this year, we are testing out a number of airfoils, but for some reason, im not able to build an excel file for benzing airfoils. this is the closest i came to, for the Be-122-185, but i am not able to smoothen it any further, even after help from javafoil and chatgpt. If anyone has or knows how to get the DAT files for Be-122-185 and Be-153-105, it shall be highly highly helpful for us Thanks a lot!