Design
Compared to last year, this design improved in terms of ease of assembly, modularity, waterproofing, ergonomics, and strength. The biggest complaint with the previous design was that assembling it was a nightmare - it took our electronics team about 4 hours. For this wheel, everything was designed to mount directly to the custom PCB housed in the center. Not only did this make assembly significantly easier, but the whole system is now modular, allowing for easy access and repair if water gets into the enclosure. Waterproofing was another major improvement, with no leaks over 40 hours of testing and competetion. To ensure that the wheel could be dissasembled easily, we cut a custom gasket out of EPDM on our waterjet, and sealed the top housing to the carbon panel and bottom housing to the frame with silicone. For ergonomics, the handles were designed using surface modeling in Solidworks. A big reason why the handles had such a drastic change in shape is because of our suspension - bumbsteer was greatly reduced, and steering lock to lock decreased from 120 degrees to 90.
Analysis
Part level FEA was done in Solidworks on the frame for the steering wheel. The image on the right shows the loadcase for maximum driver torque - about 80 ft lbs from our testing. Another simulation was done on frame rigidity for a 50 lb load acting parallel to the rotation axis. For both of these sims, the frame hit our minimum required FoS of 1.5.
Manufacturing
This is a picture with the wheel partially assembled with prototype handles. Here, you can clearly see that the frame (made from 6061 aluminum) was cut on our waterjet, and that our handles are 3D printed. As mentioned above, the EPDM gasket was also cut on our waterjet, and the back housing, like the handles, was ultimatley 3D printed out of Carbon PETG. The carbon panel was outsourced as our team does not have the means to cut carbon safely. The housing is held with countersunk M3 screws while the handles are held with quarter inch binding barrels.
