Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
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Description
The SAE Baja series is a competition that challenges university student teams on all aspects of designing, building, and testing an all-terrain vehicle. In the competition, the teams present their engineering analysis of all components of their vehicle to a panel of professional engineers to show why the team's design is the overall best in performance and in manufacturing cost. Currently Arizona State University's SAE Baja team does not have a method to analyze their vehicle's suspension system, especially on the car's shock absorbers. The current solution to this problem is to change the shock absorber parameters, test drive the car, and repeat the shock absorber tuning until the car is able to produce the performance that the team desires. The following paper introduces and demonstrates three different methods, ADAMS Car, SOLIDWORKS, and MATLAB, that can be used to analyze the suspension system and gather data that can be used in the competition presentation. ADAMS Car is a power software that is used in the automotive and other engineering fields. The program does have a steep learning curve, but once the team is comfortable using it, ADAMS is very helpful with subsystem analysis and full body analysis. SOLIDWORKS can be used to perform motion analysis and drop tests, which can then be exported into ADAMS for further analysis. MATLAB can be used to model the Baja vehicle as a quarter model, which makes it easier for the team to model. Using the methods presented in this paper, ASU's Baja team can test coil-over and air shock absorbers to determine which type is more suitable for the performance and overall cost of the whole vehicle.
ContributorsPerez, Marcos (Author) / Contes, James (Thesis director) / Redkar, Sangram (Committee member) / Engineering Programs (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
All around the automotive industry, the chassis dynamometer exists in a variety of configurations but all function to provide one common goal. The underlying goal is to measure a vehicle’s performance by measuring torque output and taking that measurement to calculate horsepower. This data is crucial in situations of testing development vehicles or for tuning heavily modified vehicles. While the current models in the industry serve their purposes for what they were intended to do, in theory, an additional system can be introduced to the dyno to render the system into an electric generator.
The hardware will consist of electric motors functioning as a generator by reversing the rotation of the motor (regenerative braking). Using the dynamometer with the additional motor system paired with a local battery, the entire system can be run off by their tuning service. When considering the Dynojet and Dynapack dynamometer, it was calculated that an estimated return of 81.5% of electricity used can be generated. Different factors such as how frequent the dyno is used and for how long affect the savings. With a generous estimate of 6 hours dyno run time a day for 250 business days and the cost of electricity being 13.19 cents/kwh the Dynapack came out to $326.45 a year and $1424.52 for the Dynojet. With the return of electricity, the amount saved comes out to $266.18 for the Dynapack and $1161.50 for the Dynojet. This will alleviate electrical costs dramatically in the long term allowing for performance shops to invest their saved money into more tools and equipment.
The hardware will consist of electric motors functioning as a generator by reversing the rotation of the motor (regenerative braking). Using the dynamometer with the additional motor system paired with a local battery, the entire system can be run off by their tuning service. When considering the Dynojet and Dynapack dynamometer, it was calculated that an estimated return of 81.5% of electricity used can be generated. Different factors such as how frequent the dyno is used and for how long affect the savings. With a generous estimate of 6 hours dyno run time a day for 250 business days and the cost of electricity being 13.19 cents/kwh the Dynapack came out to $326.45 a year and $1424.52 for the Dynojet. With the return of electricity, the amount saved comes out to $266.18 for the Dynapack and $1161.50 for the Dynojet. This will alleviate electrical costs dramatically in the long term allowing for performance shops to invest their saved money into more tools and equipment.
ContributorsCrisostomo, Ryan-Xavier Eddie (Author) / Contes, James (Thesis director) / Wishart, Jeffrey (Committee member) / Engineering Programs (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05