About the project
As part of the introductory course to Mechanical Design, each commission have to develop a small project of their choice. The main goal of the class is for the student to
be familiarize with CAD/CAE environments, by creating a working 3D CAD model and performing a suitable analysis for critical components of the assembly.
For this class my team chose to work with a T3 Rally Cross-Country (RCC) Car and decided to redesign the chassis and safety cage for a Subaru Justy ’95, to meet the FIA
safety requirements. For the engineering problem modeling assignment, we decided to study the dynamic response of the suspension system after a hypothetical car jump, a
very common situation in this type of competitions.
To accomplish this task, a mass-spring model was proposed. First, for solving the mass-spring governing equation, initial values must be provided. In this case, that is
impact velocity and spring initial displacement. The impact velocity was approximated from a simplified 2D cinematic analysis, in which the car is considered as a material
point describing a projectile motion in the vertical plane at initial velocity V0. Solving the O.D.E with the aid of a computational software, allowed us to plot
the time response of cinematic variables, i.e. position, velocity and acceleration. With the maximum acceleration value, we finally obtained the maximum resultant force.
This project introduced me to real world engineering problem modeling, showing the tip of iceberg of CAD/CAE environments and methodologies. In the gallery below, there are
some images of the 3D model.