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Formula SAE

What is Formula SAE?

Formula SAE challenges students to conceive, design, fabricate, and compete with small formula-style racing cars. Teams spend 8-12 months designing, building, and preparing their vehicles for a competition. These cars are judged in a series of static and dynamic events, including technical inspection, cost, presentation, engineering design, solo performance trials, and high-performance endurance.

formula-sae-team-2024

The Competition

The Formula SAE competition is for SAE student members to conceive, design, fabricate and compete with small formula-style racing cars. The restrictions on the car frame and engine are limited so that the knowledge, creativity and imagination of the students are challenged. The cars are built with a team effort over a period of about nine months and are taken to a host institution for judging and comparison with approximately 140 other colleges and universities throughout the world. The end result is a great experience for young engineers in a meaningful engineering project as well as the opportunity of working in a dedicated team effort.

In order to accomplish this goal, team members must use the engineering knowledge and work experience that they have gained throughout the course of their education.

The car is judged by industry professionals in the following areas:

Engineering Design
The designs are left open ended while limiting cost, size, weight, and providing restrictions for safety. The intended sales market is the non-professional weekend autocross racer. Therefore, the car must be very high performance in terms of its acceleration, braking, and handling qualities while being relatively affordable. The result of these designs will outperform any production car in terms of acceleration and lateral acceleration.

Presentation
Although the dynamic event of racing the FSAE car is the most enjoyable, a final design presentation along with a question and answer session is used to judge the students engineering reasoning behind the car. This presentation is more of a marketing presentation that is meant to “sell” the car to the amateur autocross racer.

Cost
The LTU Formula SAE is a prototype race car that must be reproducible at a cost of $25,000 at a rate of four cars per day for a limited production run, 1,000 in total. However, due to single-unit fabrication increasing material costs, equipment, and extensive testing, our prototype cost will be well over the production cost usually anywhere between $40-$70,000.

 Performance
The race car’s performance is judged through the following dynamic events:

  • Acceleration
  • Skid-Pad
  • Autocross
  • Fuel Economy
  • Endurance Race
» History
2021
3rd – for Business Presentation (out of 132)
38th – overall in Knowledge Event

Gallery

» Document Viewer

Use Your Cell Phone as a Document Camera in Zoom

  • What you will need to have and do
  • Download the mobile Zoom app (either App Store or Google Play)
  • Have your phone plugged in
  • Set up video stand phone holder

From Computer

Log in and start your Zoom session with participants

From Phone

  • Start the Zoom session on your phone app (suggest setting your phone to “Do not disturb” since your phone screen will be seen in Zoom)
  • Type in the Meeting ID and Join
  • Do not use phone audio option to avoid feedback
  • Select “share content” and “screen” to share your cell phone’s screen in your Zoom session
  • Select “start broadcast” from Zoom app. The home screen of your cell phone is now being shared with your participants.

To use your cell phone as a makeshift document camera

  • Open (swipe to switch apps) and select the camera app on your phone
  • Start in photo mode and aim the camera at whatever materials you would like to share
  • This is where you will have to position what you want to share to get the best view – but you will see ‘how you are doing’ in the main Zoom session.