Body Team
- What paint do you use to paint the car?
- How did you guys go about designing your shell to shell attachment mechanism?
- Any insight on how to do large-format resin infusion? Do you do yours in house?
- How do you attach your bulkheads to your car?
- what mold release do you use?
Dynamics
- Frame
- How do you simulate your frame?
- Solid bodies/Shells?
- If solids, do you use beams to establish displacement BCs or do you just simulate with load cases
- Experience doing a space frame or is all frame sim on composites?
- Suspension
- How do you train your members to have a good knowledge and intuition of kinematics, especially freshmen who haven't taken dynamics yet
- what resources do yall use to better understand susp technical concepts
- UNSPRUNG MASS
- How do you design parts that can withstand fatigue? Hand calcs? FEA? Want to design for ASC not just FSGP
- Do you use topology optimization for lightening or do you do it by hand/trial and error?
- Do you use the Mitsuba motor? What do you aim for in your tires
- what tires do you use
- Steering
- How do you control toe on your rear wheels?
- What is your upper level design process/design philosophy?
- what kind of testing/validation do yall do?
- To what level do you model and characterize your car?
- What components do you characterize(ie. shock absorber characteristics)
- what data do you collect from onboard sensors
- how do yall set up ur tests,
- what are the inputs/outputs
- what have u learned abt how to do a test correctly/efficiently?
- how do u calculate uncertainty in the sensors (if at all)
- How do you decide what data should be sent over telemetry during/after driving?
- How do you choose what sensors to use?
- What is your transmission range?
- How did you decide on the placement of the radios/antennae (if applicable)?
- Do you do any analysis to predict the amount of noise generated by different arrangements?
- How do you store your telemetry data?
- How is the data incorporated into your workflow?
- To what level do you model and characterize your car?
Power Generation
- Do you use commercial MPPTs, if so which ones?
- Which solar cells do you use, do you manufacture the panels in-house or buy them completed?
- How do you mount your modules/array to the top shell?
- Do you have a Power Generation team? And if so, what is the scope of their work?
- From Matthew: (Only if MIT makes them in house)
- What's your typical PPE and SOP for working with the array & HV electronics
- Does MIT faculty and admin care about your org
- What is target mppt power density and cost?
- How do you feel about pcb magnetics (inductors, transformers)
- Mcu family of choice? What rtos if any? How developed is your sw stack?
- What is passive power consumption of the MPPT?
- Is mppt running off power from array or vehicle bus (12v, 48v)
- High voltage low current or high current low voltage?
Are you madlads and just go ac with string inverters instead of mppts
Next Gen
Body
- How do you attach the array to the shell of the car?
Dynamics
- Frame
- thoughts on a 3-layer space frame or a space frame catamaran?
- Suspension
- What software do you use to design the suspension geometry? VSUSP? Lotus? Own kinematics software/calculator?
- What suspension properties do you optimize for? (how would u if ZERO prevdata) what were the main design factors? (i think spring rates, roll, pitch, bump str, hardpoint sensitivity, CG bias)
- IMPORTANT what weights did yall end up assigning to each major factor and can u give a quick rundown of why
- what is the very first thing u did when u began design? what is the second thing u did?
^ again but if u didn't have a previous car to work off of (zero data) - how did u do top op? (what tool, is it straightforward or anything gotta watch out for)
- did yall use lapsim? if so what inputs/outputs did u use?
- What did u use besides spring/damper rate & tire compliance to calculate effective spring rate?
- how did u do the math on most of these things? Make ur own excel calculators?
- Unsprung
- How do you go about preventing uprights from being excessively large? How do you decide the shape of your uprights?
- Do you use metal 3D printing?
- Steering
- How do you approach steering optimization?
- Do you have a program that calculates steering metrics? what metrics go in and out?
- Do you take tire slip angle into account for the optimization? if so, where do you get your tire performance data?
- How closely does your steering team work with suspension to handle things like steering wheel torque as a relationship between scrub radius/mechanical advantage of steering wheel?
- How do you decide lock to lock steering wheel angle?
- have you ever experimented with alternate steering designs(not a tierod based 3 bar mechanism)
- How do you approach steering optimization?
Electro-Mechanical
- How do you assemble your battery box to keep it electrically issolated?
- Do you cool your batter box? If so how did you go about calculating the necessary air flow?
- How do you split up all of your electrical enclosures within your car? Like do you have an enclosure of high voltage lines and low voltage lines?
- What materials do you use to make your battery box and other enclosures?
Ergo
- How do you calculate/verify that your brakes can actually stop the car?
- What do you do, if anything to keep the driver cool?
- what specific materials did you make the pedal box out of (pedal base, any mounting points/holes, arms)?