THE CAR The team was excited for our first full year in the new shop down at 271 India Street. The focus for 2013 was to design a more reliable and drivable vehicle while adding additional data logging and processing ca-pabilities, to improve our tuning ability and allow our vehicle to serve as a test-bed for future years. The team additionally contin-ued to work towards its goal of enabling amateur drivers to take full advantage of the car’s potential. The team was happy to welcome back The-rice Morris (’13), who studied abroad at Cambridge and returned as the 2013 Chassis/Suspension Lead. Therice rede-signed the bellcranks to provide an approx-imately constant motion ratio between the wheels and the dampers, which results in an overall linear rising rate. This enabled us to match the overall goals of improving drivability by reducing understeer while braking and oversteer during acceleration. Stephen Weinreich (’14) and Sam Friedman (’15) redesigned the team’s custom elec-tronics board for shifting to have greater tolerance to noise and to introduce a Con-troller Area Network (CAN) node at the board. This provides the microprocessor

access to all data from the Engine Control Unit (ECU). In addition to improving data accuracy, having CAN also provides the team with a test-bed for future advances in shifting algorithms and other vehicle elec-tronics. Evan Lester (‘13) and Beverly Xu (‘14) de-veloped a superior all-aluminum gas tank design which improved fuel availability in high-acceleration scenarios. Rather than using anti-slosh foam as in previous years, Evan and Bev opted to design a surge tank. They were able to keep the weight of the system approximately constant by develop-ing ultra-lightweight custom one-way check valves based on those used in NASCAR vehicles. Finally, Steven Klurfeld (’13), designed a two-piece, aluminum enclosure and acrylic housing sleeve for the Torsen T1 Universi-ty Special differential gearset to dramatically reduce weight over the stock cast iron housing and to facilitate attachment to the chain and chassis. This design eases assem-bly while reducing overall mass by 7.5 per-cent and rotational moment of inertia by 25 percent compared to our previous year’s design.

0-60 ~3.2 sec

Overall weight 442 lbs.

Weight distribution 49.0F / 50.3L

Wheelbase 62 in

Front Track 40 in

Rear Track 39 in

‘13 Vehicle Statistics

fsae@brown.edu

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NEWSLETTER 2014

Mr. and Mrs. Paul Sorensen Mr. Laurence Klurfeld and Mrs. Joele Frank Mr. Luke Angelini Mr. David Brown Ms. Elinor Fung Mr. Eli Bashevkin Mr. Mark Fuller Mr. Adam Greenbaum Mr. Nicholas Vina The Keeth Family Mr. Benjamin Freudberg Mr. Richard Brown and Mrs. Kim Sichel Mr. & Mrs. Dale Truman Mr. and Mrs. Steve Walti Mr. Daniel Weinreich Mr. Raphael Gottesman Mr. and Mrs. Ron Cooper Mr. and Mrs. Steve Miranda Ms. Bethany Block Mr. James Xu and Ms. Connie Yan Mrs. Rita Michaelson

Industrial Heat Treating

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The Car The Competition The Team The Future Thank You Contact Us

A Special Thank You for:

Donations in the Memory of

Samuel Klurfeld, Grandfather '13

As always, please feel free to visit the team website at www.brown.edu/fsae, and we would love to hear from you at our shop email address, fsae@brown.edu!

The competition held at the Michigan Inter-national Speedway in May never fails to pro-vide grounds for an eventful and exciting competition! The team is thankful for the continued support of our dedicated faculty advisor, Chris Bull (’79), who ensured that the car made it safely to Detroit in one piece. Having packed the entire shop into the truck, the rest of the team followed in three rental cars, excited and ready to go for the next day. The static events went well, and the design judges were particularly impressed with the shifting system that Jeanette Miranda (‘14) worked on this year. They also commented on the ease of turning, credited to a joint effort by Colden Eldridge (’14) and Therice, and thus the car’s easy drivability, always an important emphasis for this year's younger

drivers. Jay Young (‘14), Victoria (Tori) Lee (‘15), and Graham Keeth (‘16) also led the team in our best-ever effort in the business presentation, in which judges were impressed by our customer-focused business model! The dynamic events were more of a learning experience. The six drivers for the dynamic events were Therice Morris, Max Gottesman (’13), Morgan Walti (‘13), Colden Eldridge, Jeanette Miranda, and Stephen Weinreich, and all passed egress easily. There were some hold-ups at technical inspection, but the team performed admirably to make the necessary changes under the time constraints. These last minute-fixes put the team behind sched-ule, but late on Friday afternoon, Max passed brakes to a round of cheers from the team. Thanks to the time saved by passing the

noise test on the first attempt, there was just enough time for Stephen to get in an auto-cross run. The car completed the autocross event suc-cessfully. Unfortunately, during Enduro, the car was pulled because of a broken brake light. The wire from the brake pressure sen-sor to the light fatigued, and eventually broke in the middle of the race. This happened to two other teams at competition this year as well. While the team was frustrated and dis-appointed at not performing nearly as well at competition as would have been possible given proper testing time, the takeaway is overwhelmingly positive. The team is excited to push forward towards this year’s competi-tion and develop quite simply the best car in Brown FSAE's history!

THE COMPETITION This year brings many new and exciting opportunities for the team. The team jumped straight into teaching new members to weld and machine back in September and has continued passing knowledge on through competition and into the summer. With Brown’s Formula SAE Team, the learning never stops. This year, the team is continuing to follow the spring-design and fall-build process, initiated by Max in 2012. This year’s car is being designed by both new and returning members who worked tirelessly to ensure that manufacturing began by the beginning of the school year. One of the major goals for 2013-2014 in-volves increasing the allotted time to tune the car. Tuning is a significant factor in

operating the car to its full potential, and in the past, has been cut short in the face of the fast-approaching competition. With the new time schedule, the team will have more of the spring semester to bring the car to its peak performance. To this end, the team is performing a cost-benefit analysis on time-intensive processes such as composite mold-making to determine whether it is worth having these done out of house to free up additional time for tuning. In other exciting news, the team has used donations received this past year to fund the purchase of a CNC milling machine for our Tockwotton shop, which was quickly put to use. The new CNC has a very easy-to-use interface, and we are very excited to take full advantage of it while machining many of the complex parts of our car!

THE FUTURE

Congratulations to the team's seniors, who graduated last May! Therice Morris is currently attending Stan-ford studying electrical engineering. Steven Klurfeld is also at Stanford pursuing his degree in mechanical engineering. Max Gottesman loves FSAE so much he couldn’t leave Brown; he is attending the School of Engineering’s fifth-year masters program in electrical engineering. Evan Lester has started his postgraduate research in synthetic chemistry at Yale University, and Morgan Walti is working for Chrysler in Michigan. The team wishes each of them the very best, as they will be sorely missed! We have gained many enthusiastic team members this year who have already contributed greatly to the car! At the same time, we are extremely excited to have our freshmen from last year take on design roles: Brennan MacInnes (Body), Danna Nozik (Cooling), Graham

Keeth (Shifting Pneumatics), Joshua Wang (Seat), Nicholas McGurk (Aerodynamics), Peter Cooper (Wiring Harness), Samuel Steffl (Fuel), and James Dil-ling and Richard Deng (Pedalbox)! The upperclassmen designed the remaining subsystems: Stephen Weinreich (Electronics), Jeanette Miranda (Chassis/Suspension), Colden Eldridge and Victoria Lee (Powertrain), and Samuel Friedman (Drivetrain). Each of these individuals have already contributed countless hours of hard work and boundless enthusiasm. We are looking forward to seeing all of the new subsystem designs come together as we approach competition. A special thank you goes to our captain of two years - we are grateful for all that you’ve done for the team, Max. We would also like to give a shout-out to our team manager Tori for her continued dedication to the team and perpetual cheerfulness!

THE TEAM

CONTACT US

“FSAE provided me with an unparalleled opportunity to apply skills learned in my engineering classes in a practical manner— and taught me things they never could have.”

c o l d e n :

For the past four years, the team has had the pleasure of being in-volved in Brown University’s local outreach to the Vartan Gregorian Elementary School in Providence, and this year featured perfect weather to show off the racecar! The fourth-graders had the oppor-tunity to sit in our car, ask ques-tions to their curiosity’s content, and even offer impressive design suggestions to the team. In the picture to the left, Katelyn Nunez from Ms. Kenner’s class smiles happily as she reaches eagerly for the pedals!

>> outreach

The team would like to extend their most heartfelt appreciation to all of the sponsors who made this year possible. The diversity of Brown’s team adds a wonderful dynamic to the manufacture and design of the car each year. The valuable skills gained from being on the car team are not merely con-fined to engineering, but also extend to industrial design, collaboration, software applications, budgeting, and time manage-

ment. The team is grateful to all of the sponsors for their resources, knowledge, and perpetual support. One very special acknowledgement goes to Chris Bull, the team’s amazing faculty advi-sor, who has time and again proved an in-valuable resource. Chris, for putting up with us through the best and the worst, thank you!

THANK YOU!

One team.

One year.

One car.