For my senior year I’m leading the research, design, analysis, and manufacturing of the steel tube space frame chassis for the Virginia Motorsports FSAE team. The role requires cross-functional coordination with every other subteam to lock in packaging constraints and rules requirements, then owning the design, the Structural Equivalency justification, and all manufacturing. I used SimScale for iterative FEA to inform the design. I have a team of eight other students on my subteam who own different components, and I’m the point of accountability from concept through final weld. It’s a project I have full ownership of, and I’m excited to see it come to fruition.

I’m about six months in, and the design and analysis are complete. The chassis has passed its Critical Design Review (slides below), and the last step before we cut metal is submitting the Structural Equivalency Spreadsheet. After that it’s on to manufacturing, the final phase of the project.

Below are more images and the PDR to show off some of the different stages in the research and design phase!