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NYU's Motorsports Design Team
Suspension and Steering Engineer
September 2024 - January 2025
NYU Motorsports FSAE is the motorsports design team that participates in the Formula SAE electric competition. During my semester on the team, I conducted design verifications and manufactured components using waterjet.
Suspension Tab Waterjetting
Suspension Tab Waterjetting
Intersecting tabs with the tubes
The tabs on the body of the car served as a connection point for control rods in suspension. I've conducted verifications with the CAD to ensure that the downloaded DXFs were prepared for water jetting and fit accurately to the body tubes of the car. I intersected the tab with the body tubes to delete intersecting parts. Since the tabs had uneven areas on the top and bottom sides, the one with a smaller area was taken as the correct profile. Since having an extra gap makes it ideal for the creation of weld joints, the smaller profile is ideal for waterjetting. All of the DXF files were downloaded and combined.
A problem I noticed regarding the manufacturing was the ambiguity regarding the labeling of the tabs. Since the tabs are generally the same shape with minuscule dimensional differences, I decided to create a labeling system that was easy to identify, short, and readable for everyone on the team. The guide can be seen on the right. It identifies each tab with 5 pieces of information. By using the labeling guide, the suspension team and the manufacturing team were able to successfully identify each suspension tabs with no mixups. This resulted in no material waste due to re-cuts and reduced welding times by organizing tabs more effectively.
In order to reduce metal waste, I manually nested all of the tabs to cut. When initially imported, the total cutting area was around 9.8 in x 10 in. By manually nesting, I was able to reduce the cutting area to 7.7 in x 7.7 in.
After the combined DXF was exported, a PDF document with all of the tabs labeled according to my guideline was created and sent.
After working with the manufacturing team, I was able to operate the waterjet to cut out the DXFs. I manually placed the micro-joints to avoid fragile areas such as the thin connection point with the tubes. This resulted in successful waterjetting of the tabs with no failed parts.
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