Rear Uprights
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July 2025 - Present | Northwestern Formula Racing
Lead mechanical design of rear uprights. Conducted DFM, designed around 4 different load cases, and prepared engineering drawings for outsourced manufacturing.
CAD
Designed to support mounting for brake calipers, an upper control arm, lower wishbone, and tie rod for suspension. Optimized for weight distribution, including new bearing selection with 59% mass reduction from prior year. Created a MATLAB tool for this bearing selection with peak force and fatigue calculations.
Additionally, I created a rear wheel assembly of over 125 parts, enabling suspension team members to coordinate packaging of brake calipers, hubs, brake rotors, and uprights inside the rear wheels. This ensured that we were confident in our clearances and could design around our complex suspension geometry.
Rear Upright in wheel
FEA
I optimized the rear upright through multiple FEA iterations under braking, acceleration, and inside/outside cornering forces to meet a ≥1.50 Factor of Safety design requirement, all while minimizing mass. To obtain the forces for these load cases, I worked with a MATLAB script that used vehicle dynamics to calculate bearing forces on the uprights.
Acceleration Simulation: 2.071 FoS
Inside Cornering Simulation: 1.845 FoS
Braking Simulation: 2.533 FoS
Outside Cornering Simulation: 1.546 FoS
Manufacturing
Manufacturing using 7075-T6 Aluminum. Outsourced through club sponsor, for whom I prepared two engineering drawings for using appropriate tolerances for bearing press fitting and locating suspension pickup points.
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