Anteater Electric Racing - FSAE EV at UC Irvine
Project Thesis
Anteater Electric Racing’s primary objective is to conceive, design, fabricate, and test an electric formula racecar following the Formula SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers, Intl.) rulebook and enter it in the FSAE California competition. FSAE is an engineering education competition that requires performance demonstration of the formula vehicles in a series of events, both off track and on track against the clock.
Our Goal is to be the first team from the University of California, Irvine to pass the stringent technical inspection at the Formula SAE Electric competition and score 600 points so our electric vehicle, Ampeater 2020, may place top five.
Our current design philosophy involves an iterative design process with a two year cycle to ensure nothing is overlooked. Additionally, the team shifted the timeline four months earlier than previous years, made possible by expediting the design of the vehicle to ensure completion by the end of summer.
Team Purpose
Our project offers students practical engineering skills, real world knowledge, design & manufacturing experience that would aid them in industry. Team members are challenged to design and build an all electric vehicle according to extensive FSAE technical regulations within 40 weeks. The FSAE competition also serves as an avenue for our student engineers to interact with industry representatives across the nation.
Competition & Vehicle Design Objective
The Objective of the FSAE competition is to provide a challenge to SAE students in designing high performing, open-wheeled formula race cars to compete against other universities across the globe. FSAE is an annual competition and Anteater Electric Racing will compete in the California region against 35 other Electric Vehicles and 75 Internal Combustion Vehicles.
Vehicle Design is paramount to the competition - Teams are to assume they work for an engineering firm contracted to design, fabricate, test and demonstrate a one-off prototype vehicle. The vehicle should have high performance and high reliability to compete in all events, and will be judged on aesthetics, cost, ergonomics, maintainability and manufacturability. Each vehicle will participate in a series of Static and Dynamic events to determine the winner of the competition.
The competition will be held in Fontana, California June 17-20 at the Auto Club Speedway.
Approach
To facilitate the process of building an electric vehicle for competition, our team is organized into two major systems - Electrical and Mechanical - with a respective Chief Engineer. Both major systems have subteams with a subteam lead and associate engineers.
The Electrical System is composed of the Electrical, Embedded, and High-Voltage (Batteries) subsystems. The Mechanical System is composed of the Aerodynamics-Body, Chassis, Driveline, Ergonomics, and Suspension subteams. To wrap the team organization, there exists a Management subteam to facilitate the process of building the electric vehicle.
