SAE Baja is a collegiate Engineering competition where students around the world design, build, and race at different competitions across the country. These competitions simulate real world design projects and their related challenges by testing teams through a series of static and dynamic vehicle testing events, along with business and design presentation where students get to show their innovative designs to industry leading professionals.
Arizona Competition May 2025
Arizona Competition May 2025
As suspension lead I researched vehicle dynamics and mechanics to design a suspension system optimizing kinematic characteristics and manufacturability. I had a sub team of 5 individuals who I taught everything I knew, ranging from suspension geometry design, CAD design, and teaching numerous manufacturing techniques such as turning, manual and CNC vertical milling. Milliken's race car dynamics was used in unison with Lotus Shark Kinematics to determine the suspension setup. I decided upon a Double wishbone setup (2 A arms, UCA Loaded) in the front allowing ease of manufacturing and great suspension point optimization for handling characteristics, for the rear; a H arm frame is used with a loaded upper link (camber link) to keep everything planar for manufacturing. While designing the system I worked closely with other design leads to ensure correspondence amongst all sub teams. Lotus Shark Kinematics was used for all kinematics analysis as it allows for the simulation of key suspension characteristics such as castor, camber, toe, and many more that directly determine the vehicle's performance such as straight line handling and inducing oversteer vs understeer. Those key characteristics can easily be plotted as a function of shock travel, allowing us to minimize the change of toe and camber through travel while maintaining positive castor angle and scrub radius to give a responsive steering feel. The placement of our Fox Evols was also optimized to use the benefits of a motion ratio by laying the shock over, allowing for 10+ in wheel travel with just under 6” of shock travel. Solidworks was used for CAD modeling, drawing, and finite element analysis. Loading conditions were determined from data collected with wheel force transducers and strain gauges on the previous car.
Final CAD Model
Final CAD Model
Final CAD Model
