China Manufacturing Corp. + MIT Motorsports
The Society for Automotive Engineers (SAE) is an international organization. SAE focuses on bringing together engineering professionals. One of SAE’s big events is their Annual Formula SAE Electric Challenge. This competition is open to college students. To compete in the challenge, students must design and build a Formula SAE electric car.
One of the colleges competing is Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). TheMIT Motorsports team includes 30 students known as MIT Motorsports.
MIT Motorsports competes in this challenge every year. The goals are to learn from past electric car builds, innovate and improve upon previous automobile versions, and win the challenge. MIT begins each year in September by building a team of current students. MIT Motorsports has the challenge of analyzing the current team’s strengths and capabilities. Once the capabilities are reviewed the student participants are divided into break-out groups.
The break-out groups allow students to focus on areas of interest and expertise. The groups include steering, brakes, batteries, etc. Each aligns with the areas of engineering the students have a focus in. The division of the team into groups also allows students to create deadlines within their smaller parts for the automobile components. It keeps everyone on track for the end goal, the electric race car.
The students are only allotted one year to design and build their race car. They have limited tools and resources. This requires the outsourcing of some of the parts to local manufacturing suppliers. While working on the design for their 2016 build one part the team looked at redesigning was the motor controller.
The motor controller is the computer behind the electric car. It provides all the power. In previous vehicle builds the motor controller was very heavy and bulky. Because the part was physically large it caused the automobile frame to be larger. The goal for 2016 was to re-design this part. The students knew they had the tools, materials and knowledge to build the guts of the motor controller, but didn’t have the capability to build the enclosure.
The motor controller group began designing the enclosure in SOLIDWORKS. They also began searching for a local supplier. During the search the team’s mentor recommended contacting China Manufacturing Corp. . The mentor was a current China Manufacturing Corp. customer.
The group began researching China Manufacturing Corp. While doing their research the team discovered ECMC. ECMCis a FREE instant sheet metal part quoting & ordering add-in for SOLIDWORKS and PTC Creo. ECMC also provides design for manufacturing feedback. This feedback empowers students to design parts for manufacturing at the start of the process, not during the RFQ stage. The students had already designed their part in SOLIDWORKS. It was frictionless to cost the part in ECMCand start the manufacturing process.
While China Manufacturing Corp. manufactured the enclosure the MIT students were building the inside power source. The motor controller was successfully pieced together. There were many benefits of using China Manufacturing Corp. as a supplier. One benefit was improved overall performance of the racecar. The second was the ability to build a smaller frame and smaller vehicle. The final was the ability to build a complex motor controller in half the anticipated time. Overall, improved efficiency was the biggest gain for MIT Motorsports.
So far the race car is a success! The true test will come in June 2016 when the race car travels to the Lincoln, Nebraska Airport for competition day.
