TAU Racing have had a busy start to the 2018 semester, welcoming on board fresh faces to the team and implementing the Formula Student UK 2018 feedback to the design of the
TAU-19 car. All the TAU-19 technical heads have put forward some ambitious ideas for the coming season and have made great progress in the preliminary design stages as we work to finalise the design of TAU-19.
MEET THE TEAM
With the TAU-19 project now in full swing, TAU Racing are proud to introduce the TAU-19 committee. This year’s committee has a range of new faces, as well as seeing more experienced members progressing into more advanced roles. This ensures the right balance of fresh experience and knowledge transfer are being injected into the team’s day-to-day operations.
LAB REFURBISHMENT USING '5S' APPROACH
After 10 months of design, refinement and manufacture of the TAU-18 car, the project downtime over summer was dedicated to a much-needed lab refurbishment. With the team’s competitive standing improving year on year it was vital to refurbish our space to suit a more efficient working environment. This was achieved through the help of our long-standing sponsor, Grampian Fasteners. They helped consult the team in various industry standard practices to help achieve our goal and have kindly supplied the necessary tooling required to carry out the TAU-19 project. The team applied the systematic ‘5S’ approach, to achieve efficiency and improved safety in our workspace allowing us to fully utilise our allocated working space to the maximum. The 5S approach focuses on effective tool organisation, labelling and sustained maintenance, this ensures the team enters into the new season with maximised productivity during day-to-day operations.
RECRUITMENT OF NEW MEMBERS
This year the team has been enlarged by students from a variety of disciplines throughout the university. We were delighted to see more than 50 new faces attending our introductory sessions, where the new recruits got to learn more about the project as well as the IMechE Formula Student competition. Technical Department heads have been running weekly design tasks, allowing new members to experience the different aspects of technical departments within the team. This gave our new members great insight into each department, and an opportunity to determine their preferred area of interest within the team.
TESTING AND DATA ACQUISITION
Running an early testing session was a top priority for the team following feedback from the 2018 design event judges. An improved understanding of systems on the TAU-18 car due to data acquisition ensures that new designs for the 2019 vehicle can be approached with improved understanding and insight into the vehicle’s operation. The team achieved this through addition of new g-sensors and thermocouples to the oil and cooling systems, enabling technical heads to further explore the dynamic characteristics of their designs.
ADAMS SOFTWARE
Based on feedback from the FSUK 2018 design competition, the team have worked to generate a dynamic model of our vehicle using the multibody dynamic simulation software, Adams. The software allows a virtual model of our Formula Student car to be developed, inputting our current parameters and simulating different Formula Student dynamic events to generate theoretical dynamic parameters which contribute to validating and understanding our designs. Given the short timescale of a Formula Student project, Adams is a highly valuable resource for testing different configurations, as well as cross-data comparison with the new sensors.
SPONSORSHIP DRIVE
TAU Racing have continued to broaden our sponsorship pool, generating new links with companies keen to contribute to our project. Since September, Loctite, TRAC Oil & Gas and E-Plan have come on board to support the team with their expert services. Furthermore, we are thrilled to announce the return of Triumph Motorcycles to our sponsor network, allowing our powertrain team a better opportunity to further develop the Triumph 675 Daytona engine over the season. Additionally, following a hub failure during pre-competition testing, TRAC Oil & Gas are providing their expertise in non-destructive testing, conducting dye pen analysis on the failed components to assist in determining the cause of failure. Non-destructive testing is one of the new areas of analysis that TAU Racing are looking to further implement over the coming season.
The team are now entering the final stages of design completion before pausing for a much-needed Christmas break. To keep posted with the team’s progress, visit our website, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram platforms. The TAU-19 team look forward to publishing the next updated newsletter with our progress during the opening of the new year.
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