UWA Motorsport at the University of Western Australia is fast tracking design by using Altium Designer.
“Altium Designer allows us to spend more time innovating and gaining important industry knowledge than any other system. By using Altium Designer’s flexible features, we have been able to reduce manufacture times and gain full confidence in the implementation of our systems”.
- Gurkaran Bansal,
Project Leader, UWA Motorsport
The need
There are many things that drive university students towards electrical engineering, but for a team of 50 students from The University of Western Australia, it’s the sheer thrill of the race track. Creating a formula style race car from scratch, this group of dedicated students aim for the ultimate prize: to be number one in the Formula SAE competition.
Competition is fierce. The Formula SAE is a major international student competition in which approximately 200 universities from North America, Europe, Asia and Australasia compete annually. The preemptor to the major event is the local Australian event. This is run each December and helps to gauge the team’s performance before the main event. This competition alone attracts around 25 Australian universities as well as several international teams. The main competition, held in Michigan, each May, draws approximately 130 international universities and is the definitive competition.
The challenge
Each year, UWA Motorsport must design, manufacture and test an open wheel (formula style) car for the annual competition. The process is lengthy, and students complete this all within a project time frame of 10 months. To meet this challenge, students divide the process into several stages of production. Four months is allocated to research and design prototyping, three months to complete the final design and 3 months for assembly and testing. Adding to the already challenging task, students must also adhere to strict design guidelines. The majority of electrical systems in the race car must be custom-built and meet strict requirements of limited cost, weight and size.
Due to the custom nature of the systems, UWA Motorsport previously had issues with unreliability and poor serviceability of previous software. For several years of the competition, UWA Motorsport used basic layout tools that required constant component footprints on a case-by-case basis. The time consuming and repetitive task often placed a great deal of strain on the timely development of the vehicle.
The solution
By using Altium Designer’s extensive libraries, UWA Motorsport avoids the iterative process required by its older toolset. With Altium Designer, UWA Motorsport can also continue to develop and improve the electronic systems within its vehicles. Altium Designer gives the team the complete freedom to revisit designs and change the layout without any complications or faults. By combining schematic design and layout into one package, UWA Motorsport is finding layouts being completed quickly and easily. The once arduous task is now free from all the errors that previously occurred. Tools such as the Design Rule Check (DRC) and signal integrity are helping the team to create advanced control and telemetry systems that perform flawlessly in what is considered a very harsh environment.
In addition, UWA Motorsport plan to revive all previous designs to help diagnose and eradicate any problems identified and improve them. The unified design environment of Altium Designer makes this all possible. By integrating more of its systems into modular components, UWA Motorsport can dramatically reduce the weight and size of its vehicle parts.
The results
UWA Motorsport team came second at the annual FSAE competition in Michigan, May 2007. The team achieved strong results in all events, including first place in the endurance event.
During the Michigan FSAE competition, the UWA Motorsport team was presented with the prestigious Carroll Smith Award for Innovation. Only three of these awards have been awarded in FSAE history and UWA Motorsport is in possession of all three. The team’s creativity and innovation has also been widely recognized throughout the years. The team has dominated design, winning the Engineering Design award twice in the USA and three times in the last four years in the Australasian competition. All of which helped the team achieve first place overall in the Australasian competition in 2005.
FSAE information
The FSAE is an international design competition facilitated by the Society of Automotive Engineers. The competition gives young engineers hands-on experience by offering a practical and competitive environment to employ their skills. The competition works by placing students in a hypothetical situation where they are asked to design, manufacture, test and compete for a fictitious car manufacturing company.
By setting of a range of restrictions on the weight and size of vehicle components, the competition aims to tap into the student’s creativity and problem solving skills. These components are then used to compile results based on the eight different disciplines: Design, Cost and Manufacturing, Presentation, Acceleration, the Skidpad event, the Autocross event, Fuel Economy and Endurance.
About the university
The University of Western Australia (established in 1911) has an international reputation for excellence and enterprise, and has been rated as one of the best comprehensive universities in Australia. It is also one of Australia’s leading research universities – a member of the Australian ‘Group of Eight’ research universities.
Research and research training remain the major factors setting the university apart as one of Australia’s leading research-intensive universities and the premier institution in Western Australia. For almost a century, its highly talented researchers have produced quality outcomes that have contributed substantially to the social, cultural and economic development of Western Australia and Australia more generally.
UWA’s School of Engineering and School of Electrical Engineering use Altium Designer to develop its students design abilities. Altium continues to support future engineers by sponsoring initiatives such as UWA Motorsport. UWA Motorsport has been supplied five Altium Designer licenses worth AUS $22,497 for both the 2006 and 2007 FSAE seasons.
For more information on UWA Motorsport or the University of Western Australia visit: www.motorsport.uwa.edu.au or www.uwa.edu.au
