Design and Fabrication of Carbon Fibre/Epoxy-Aluminum Hybrid Suspension Control Arms for Formula SAE Race Cars

Suspension system of a vehicle plays an important role to carefully control motion of the wheel throughout the travel. The vertical and the lateral dynamics (ride and handling) is affected by the unsprung-to-sprung mass ratio. Lower value of this mass ratio leads to enhanced performance of the car. To optimize the unsprung mass of the car, design of control arm plate is optimized with Aluminum material and Carbon fibre reinforced composite control arms framework are used to achieve high stiffness to weight ratio. These leads to increase in overall power to weight ratio of the car which helps to deliver maximum performance to the wheels. Through analysis of real-life working conditions of the entire steering knuckle assembly in ACP pre- post ANSYS 18.1 with the defined boundary conditions, equivalent stress and total deformations are obtained. Based on the results, geometrical topology of the control arms plates is further optimized. After several tensile tests on different bond length and bond gap, the outer surface of control arm tube was bonded to the inner surface of control arm plate with a bond length of 30mm using the DP 490 adhesive. The carbon fibre/epoxy aluminum framework design achieved a weight reduction of 4 kgs from the AISI 1020 control arm assembly.