Drivetrain Team Update - Knuckles

The drivetrain team set out with many challenges and goals this year. The designing of the knuckles were done from scratch due to re-designing of the suspension system. This was a challenging but fun task. It required working closely with the suspension, brake and hub design team members. The design went through many iterations until the final design was reached. Finite Element Analysis was performed on the knuckles using Algor. The factor of safety of the front knuckle is 2.6 and weighs approximately 2.4 pounds.

Front Knuckle Design

Rear Knuckle Design

Front Knuckle, Hub, and Brake Assembly

- Brian Blocher

Brakes

The design of the rotors was not a quick or easy job. There were many factors that had to be looked into for the design such as the weight of the car that the brakes needed to stop, the size of the wheels that the rotors were to be packaged in, the manufacturability of the assembly, the size of the calipers, and the hydraulic pressure in the lines required to lock all the wheels just to name a few. We went through multiple iterartions to finalize the design we have now. The final design includes four outboard disc brakes and incorporates the use of a top hat with a floating rotor. They are shown in the figures below.

- Ben Beall

Front Rotor

Top Hat

The rotors float on the top hat through the use of the floating rotor buttons. These buttons are wider than the thickness of the rotor and top hat, so the rotors can shift a few hundredths of an inch on the top hat in order to stay centered in the calipers. Once we designed everything that we wanted for the disc brakes, we put them together in an assembly in SolidWorks.

Rear Brake Assembly

Once we had created an assembly, we were able to put the model into ALGOR to simulate the stresses the rotor would see. This allowed us find the factor of safety for the disc brake and make design changes based off how big or small the safety factor was.

Model of Rear Floating Rotor Assembly in ALGOR