Duke University Motorsports: Aero and Active Aero Progress

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Aero and Active Aero Progress

Aero and active aero are almost done now. The actuator is now attached to its link solidly now, and the last step on the active aero part is to tune the PID parameters on the motor controller. We finished putting together the rear wing yesterday too, and so after a little bit of sanding/trimming, the rear wing will be finished. The last step will be to put together the mounts, which are all done, but just not assembled.

Rear wing put together

More pictures and process discussion after the jump.

We had all the parts already at the beginning of the week, but there was still a lot of prep work that had to be done before the entire wing could be put together. First, both wing sections needed some trimming and sanding to make sure the mating interfaces were clean. Also, I had accidentally forgotten to cut the second element to length before we put the aluminum endplates on (oops), so we had to cut the second element in two places to remove some length. Basically, we kept the endplate section, cut out some more of the wing, and hot glued the two parts back together (they will get attached via carbon fiber later). Also, the mounts had to be epoxied on, and the rear wing mounts also had to be reinforced with aluminum plates (since the mounts are ABS plastic from the rapid prototyper)

Aero actuator mount epoxied on

The plates were CNC milled. They were epoxied onto the RP sections

Once this prep work was done, could fix the second element of the rear wing with carbon fiber and epoxy. This portion was vacuum bagged.

Putting down a strip of CF to reinforce the cut

Also, we put down some carbon fiber as a structural attachment on the rear wing mounts:

Finally, once these sections set, we put the rear wing together. The second element of the wing was bolted in place, the large section was hot glued to the endplates.