PO Attainment: 5/5
This Programme Outcome (PO) is attained through modules such as Computing Applications for Engineers, Computer Aided Engineering and Geometric Modelling and Computational Fluid Dynamics. I have also attained this PO through my involvement in Taylor’s Racing Team. Taylor’s Racing Team competes in FSAE, a design competition that requires students to design and manufacture a formula car that is capable of reaching speeds of up to 100km/h on a restricted 700cc engine. CAD modelling is important to design the purpose built air intake that is needed to comply with the restrictions in place for the powertrain as well as designing suspension parts for a fully custom suspension system and suspension geometry.
My contributions in the racing team involves the design of the air intake of the car. As such, I have used Solidworks to design an air intake that has a 20mm restrictor and is calculated to theoretically maximize the efficiency of the air intake at specific engines speeds. I have also used CFD tools such as Solidworks Flow Simulation to calculate the efficiency of the air intake during operations. This project is further elaborated in the Projects section.
Computational Fluid Dynamics module had allowed me to fulfill this PO utilizing ANSYS. With this module, I was able to understand the importance of a Grid Independence Test (GIT) in determining the balance between the efficiency of the solver and the accuracy of the data from the simulation. As the name suggests, a grid independence test is used to determine if the accuracy gained from increase in the number of elements in the simulation is significant, signifying the dependence of the grid elements for the accuracy of the results. When the increase of the number of elements in the geometry only results in a marginal increase in the accuracy of the results, the result is independent to the number of elements of the geometry.
My Final Year project required the use of Harmonics Acoustics simulation module from ANSYS. Harmonics Acoustics is used to analyze the frequency response of the geometry of the air intake. The results gathered from the data is able to determine the location along the air intake that shows a high resonance. This allows for a resonator to be designed to combat the resonance at a specific frequency to reduce the overall noise of the air intake system.