RACING THROUGH CREATIVITY
IPittsburgh Post-Gazette t all started with a brake rotor, the circular piece of steel that brake pads clamp down on to stop a vehicle’s wheels from turning.
Logan Tuite, a 22-year old mechanical engineering student at the University of Pittsburgh, wanted to design a better one for the Formula-style race car he is co-designing.
“We want to do things other teams have never done before,” he said during a presentation for company employees at Ansys headquarters in Cecil.
He pulled up an image of the team’s brake rotors, colored as a heat map. It’s a simple part of the car, he said, but he didn’t want it to break — pun intended.
There were enough late nights that he and the other 14 core members of his team, Panther Racing, gathered in the sub-basement of the Swanson School of Engineering in Oakland to think about ways to innovate their latest prototype, “PR-030.”
The team understood the temperatures the brake rotors could withstand under certain speed conditions and illustrated that in a simulated environment. They took a closer look and discovered that steel wasn’t the only material that they could use, but aluminum was also an option.
Lighter, cheaper, faster and innovative. “That was the defining moment of where we took our design to the next level,”Mr. Tuite said.
This Panther Racing team is competing for the 30th time in Formula SAE, an annual competition that began in 1978 as a way to test engineering students’ ability to design and deploy a Formula-style race car — a form of single-seater motor vehicle — for a fictional manufacturing company.
In this scenario, Panther Racing is one of several hundred startups, and their prototype is not only being evaluated for the design, which must match up to a slew of fine-tunedrules(Mr.Tuitesaidthemanual is 190 pages long), but also the team’s reasoning behind each engineering choice andthecostsassociatedwiththem.
Plus, the car must also complete the race at Michigan International Speedway.
Only about 50 percent complete the race, which is “really heartbreaking” because of the time teams dedicate to the event, Mr. Tuite said. The Panther Racing team’s core 15 members, for example, spend 1,500 hours per year working on their car outside of the classroom. This year’s prototype will be finished in about a month.
“Every year after a competition we sit down and we say ‘What did we do well and how can we improve on it? What did we not do well and how do we fix it?’”
Mr. Tuite has helped design Panther Racing cars since he was a freshman, and he said that in the past three years the team has seen much more consistency in its prototypes because of better analysis tools, such as computer aided drafting (CAD) software.
But those packages “didn’t show the whole picture,” Mr. Tuite said. The team now employs simulation software from Ansys that breaks the barrier between what students learned in school and how theycan apply it in a test environment.
The company did not disclose financial information on the nature of the partnershipwith Pitt.
Using the full suite of simulation software Ansys makes available to not only the Panther Racing team, but about 200 other competing teams, any of the race cars’components can be manipulated in a computer environment, which is more cost-effective than continually building andtesting out hardware.
Mr. Tuite said that while designing PR030, the team saved about $4,000, which is 6 percent of the team’s annual budget, financed by the university and dozens of sponsors.
For him, that not only proves originality,but practicality.
“We don’t want to just keep building the same car,” Mr. Tuite said. “It’s about becoming better engineers and preparing forthe workforce.”