Development of a weight-optimized wheel assembly for a Formula Student car

Abstract

Formula Student is a global competition where university teams design, build, and race their own Formula-style race cars. The competition evaluates the design and performance of the cars through both static and dynamic events. The use of electric hub motors in the Chalmers Formula Students’ car allows for greater handling but at the cost of an increase in unsprung mass. To extract the maximum performance, it is beneficial to minimize this mass, and in an attempt to do so, competing teams have started integrating parts of the wheel assembly. This paper investigates the possibility of combining parts in Chalmers Formula Students’ wheel assembly as well as other methods to save weight. To achieve this, topology optimization, finite element analysis, and computational fluid dynamics softwares are used to evaluate and compare generated concepts. The results show that it is beneficial to combine parts of the wheel assembly, especially from a weight-saving perspective. The overall weight reduction per wheel assembly is 26%, which corresponds to a decrease of 5.3 kg for the entire car.