My junior year I worked with a group of a few other students to start the Baja SAE club at LMU. This was the first year in a couple decades that LMU has had an official club. The Baja car in previous years had been primarily a capstone if students were interested. Our goal was to include underclassmen and other students that may be interested in working on Baja before their senior year. The goal of the club was to design and build a functioning car for competition in Spring 2021.
My specific role in Baja was as Vice President of the club and team lead for the front suspension. My role as vice president meant that I was planning and running meetings, managing goals and the schedule for the team, and working with faculty to keep the club running. My duties as team lead of front suspension included managing and mentoring a team of one junior and three sophomore students to design the front suspension for an all-wheel drive car.
Although the senior class of 2018 had tried to complete much of the preliminary design work for a car, the documentation was not great and it was decided to start over with a completely new design. The first step was to design the frame. Prior to starting the semester I worked to design a majority of the frame so the team would have a working CAD model. The frame below is one of the first iterations and is compliant with all Baja rules, but does not have any additional bracing or specific mounting. Some iteration was done using basic Solidworks simulations, but more simulation work will be done as well.
After designing the frame in CAD the frame was fabricated with tubing that was left from the prior Baja team (not shown). After designing and fabricating the frame each sub team continued design work. For the front suspension a double A-arm suspension was chosen due to adjustability and ease of fabrication. Some initial suspension design was performed in the Lotus Shark software and A-arms were designed to meet the geometry. Simulations and other technical diagrams were stored locally on lab computers which are not accessible due to covid so they are not shown. Some intermediate CAD models of the A-arms, hub, mounts, and shock can be seen below.
Most of the parts were ordered to fabricate the front/rear suspension and the all-wheel drive drivetrain, but this could not be completed due to covid. To continue progress I led a team of about 5 students over the summer of 2020 to continue design work on the vehicle. Further optimizations were made to the frame, the rear suspension design was solidified with simulation data, and specific drivetrain components were integrated into the CAD model. Because no access was granted to campus for the 2020-2021 school year Baja was unfortunately put on pause.