Campus Life



Useful Links

		IVLE
		NEXUS
		Registrar's Office
		Office of Student Affairs
		Library
		Radio Pulze


Share your stories

	We welcome stories about your experience in NUS. Please send us your stories, pictures and videos to:

NUS Home > Campus Life

Tired? The race goes on

By Jarrod Tan Cheng Hean

(ME4)

CARS experience fatigue too -- not just the engineers behind them.

Mechanical components suffer from fatigue, and cracks start developing in the front hub after several runs. This is just one of the many lessons I have learnt at the Mechanical Engineering Department, helping to put the 2008 FSAE car together. Once cracks appear at the race track, it would be too late to fix them. So, we have to come out with alternative designs to prevent them happening in the first place. In other words, we have to design a car that is reliable.

Faculty Advisor Prof Seah Kar Heng showing Guest of honour Rear Admiral (NS) Lui Tuck Yew our race cars on display at K1 Grand Finale at F1 Pit Building

The FSAE racecar is a good teaching aid for engineers as it enables the team to work together to conceptualise the car, design the car and build it to compete in the races in America. There are rules set by the SAE committee to ensure that the cars are safe to run and we have to design the car within these constraints. Finite element analysis ensures that the components in the car are designed to be able to take the desired loads in the lightest configuration.

The whole process from conceptualising the car to testing the car takes over a year. Once the car is fully assembled, test runs are conducted to ensure that every part is running smoothly. Should a part fail, we learn how to diagnose the problem and change the design to strengthen that part.

Through this process, I am able to apply what I have learnt in the lectures and build the system that I have designed. A lot of time was spent optimising the design of the component and we manufacture our own jigs to ensure that the component is accurately fitted onto the chassis. Testing of the car ensures that every part is sound and does not fail during the races.

Although this project takes up a lot of our time, our sacrifices are rewarded when we compete and complete the races in the US. The lessons learnt are invaluable and would be useful in our future work as engineers.

Have a good trip as you enjoy the video on the making of our latest FSAE car (click here)! By the way, we are already working on the 2009 car. There’s no rest for the FSAE crew.

Click here.