sspaugh
Automotive
- Jan 21, 2018
- 1
Hi all,
I'm a student engineer on a university solar car team and looking at designing a carbon fiber tub for our next chassis. To give some background, and get past initial doubts - I've already helped layup one car out of carbon fiber where we did prepreg/nomex for the outer body shell and had a chassis made of interlocking panels of carbon fiber+aluminum honeycomb, so I have extensive manufacturing experience with these materials. For the car that I'm designing, I have access to aerospace grade fabric as well as an autoclave and a big enough budget to cover whatever molds or core materials I may need to procure.
My question is fairly high level- my team has never designed a tub chassis, and I would love some help figuring out what the overall process would be, like steps that need to happen if I want to get this done, or help putting together a sketch of a design timeline. Any thoughts on core material outside of nomex would be great. Would also appreciate any ideas about mounting suspension parts to this type of chassis, recommendations for modeling software, or ideas/tips in general. I was planning on using Ansys to model my layup stack.
Thanks,
Sarah
I'm a student engineer on a university solar car team and looking at designing a carbon fiber tub for our next chassis. To give some background, and get past initial doubts - I've already helped layup one car out of carbon fiber where we did prepreg/nomex for the outer body shell and had a chassis made of interlocking panels of carbon fiber+aluminum honeycomb, so I have extensive manufacturing experience with these materials. For the car that I'm designing, I have access to aerospace grade fabric as well as an autoclave and a big enough budget to cover whatever molds or core materials I may need to procure.
My question is fairly high level- my team has never designed a tub chassis, and I would love some help figuring out what the overall process would be, like steps that need to happen if I want to get this done, or help putting together a sketch of a design timeline. Any thoughts on core material outside of nomex would be great. Would also appreciate any ideas about mounting suspension parts to this type of chassis, recommendations for modeling software, or ideas/tips in general. I was planning on using Ansys to model my layup stack.
Thanks,
Sarah
