MIE.23 – Redesign and Selection of Brake Components for an FSAE Race Vehicle

• Brandon Cardona
• Soroush Djangi
• Jatares Lavigne
• Kush Prasad

In FSAE (Formula Society of Automotive Engineers), an effective braking system plays a crucial role in allowing the driver to confidently maintain maximum speeds for as long as possible and safely decelerate the vehicle. UICs Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has commissioned a redesign of the FSAE vehicles braking system. The current design falls short of expected performance expectations due to experiencing bias bar deformation and having an incorrect brake distribution. To solve this problem the correct braking distribution must be achieved by either changing the master cylinders, bias bar position, or calipers. Five brake redesigns were proposed to solve the problem. The first design considered changing the calipers to fix the brake distribution, but this solution was not viable due to costs and would still need the masters to be changed. The next four brake designs proposed replacing the master cylinders with different sizes as the main form of correcting the brake distribution and reducing the load on the bias bar. After comparing the different cylinder configurations in terms of cost and performance, the best design consisted of having the bias bar centered with a 1 inch Tilton 78 Series for the rear brakes and reusing a 58 inch Tilton 77 Series for the front brakes. Multiple iterations of the chosen design were then digitally manufactured in SolidWorks. Each of these design iterations was imported into ANSYS, where static structural analyses were done to gauge the performance. Overall, the iterations of the chosen design had differences in physical configurations, but the main components did not change. The results of the static structural analysis concluded that the selected design does not fail while achieving the desired goals. A Failure Mode and Effect Analysis was then done to identify potential failures and improvements in the design. This redesign of the braking system resulted in very minimal bias bar bending and corrected the braking bias to be an evenly biased distribution between the front and rear brakes. The final design is evaluated using metrics such as cost, temperature distribution, total deformation, and equivalent stress. The underlying problem with the original SAE design was that it had a faulty brake system where the bias bar deformed, and the braking distribution was incorrect. This impacted the performance of the vehicle and posed a safety risk because of the braking systems instability. Solving the problem required using relevant engineering calculations, correct sourcing of parts, and ANSYS simulations, which ultimately produced an improved braking system.