BR-15 Steering Wheel | Design

Motorsport FSAE Formula Student Brunel Solidworks cad Prototyping

Formula Student is Europe’s most established educational motorsport competition, run by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. As a motorsport engineer from Brunel University I was keen to be involved with the competition therefor I applied for, and was successful in obtaining the role of steering wheel and driver interface designer.

This project was my final year major individual project, part of my university degree. Intending to follow a career path in the design sector of engineering this project allowed me to showcase and improve my skills in Computer Aided Design, Finite Element Analysis and project management.

The design process began with the formulation of initial concepts. This was completed using both sketches and 3D CAD models created using SolidWorks. Pugh's decision matricies were used to rank each of the concepts in order to decide which should be taken foward for further development.

| Design Concept Page |

| Design Concept SolidWorks Model |

Due to the ergonomic considerations that needed to be taken into account when designing a steering wheel for multiple drivers the design development was heavily driven with the use of prototypes. Drivers could physically hold design iterations and offer more accurate feedback as apposed to only visualising a CAD model.

Firstly a simple card template was created to guage the suitability of major dimensions such as the height and width, and the size and placement of the cutouts and driver controls.

This model highlighted the issue of the cut outs being too small, especially the upper thumb slots where there was not adequate clearance for the driver's thumb to comfortably move from its driving position to any controls on the steering wheel. Hence the design was modified from the upper CAD model to the lower.

| 1st Prototype and Subsequent Design Refinements |

For the next iteration, a foam model was CNC machined to give a more life-like model that would interpret the thumb profiles and thickness of the design. By machining the model from foam material could easily be added or removed to alter the shape as desired.

To achieve this, the CAD model created in SolidWorks was transformed into a plain solid body then saved as an .stl file which could then be uploaded to the CNC machine.

| 2nd Prototype |

| Final Steering Wheel Front and Back |

Now that the overall shape of the steering wheel had been decided upon attention was focussed towards the steering wheel interface which is made up of LED warning lights and various driver controls.

| Interface Ergonomics and Anthropometric Considerations |

Anthropometric and ergonomic data was used to design the ideal layout of the steering wheel front. The positioning of each control was determined using a 3-tier model of driver tasks along with anthropometric data of 95th percentile male hands.

The model was based on the time span in which they are performed with tasks that deal with the control and trajectory of the vehicle prioritised above other tasks.

The warning lights present on the steering wheel will have their colours chosen based upon their primary function (warning, notification etc.) and the way in which people percieve certain colours e.g red = warning/danger.