7/12/2023 Debra Levey Larson
Written by Debra Levey Larson
Six aerospace engineering students brought their best to this year’s Formula SAE Illini Motorsports aerodynamics team, helping secure first place in the North American Formula SAE competition and third place ranking in the world.
Aerodynamics Team Lead Sid Sudhir said the philosophy for this year was to focus on properly testing the aerodynamics package and building up a large team of young engineering students.
“I made it a priority this year to recruit hard and put more effort into assigning responsibility and empowering team members to get more deeply involved on the team. With more great members, we can continue to attack more problems and improve as a team,” he said.
In addition to Sudhir, who is in the class of 2025, AE team members included:
- Anthony Sanguinetti, project lead, class of 2025
- Anirudh Vishneek, team member, class of 2026
- Arif Mahmudi, team member, class of 2024
- Patrick Swiatek, team member, class of 2024
- Jacopo D'Amato, team member, class of 2026
“We know how to produce a great aero package in isolation,” Sudhir said. “Our next step in development was to test and analyze exactly where our performance is coming from, where there is room for improvement, and what sort of higher-level compromises and decisions we need to make to create the fastest vehicle overall.
“Doing this sort of testing validated our tools and simulations and ensured that we are designing around the right factors.”
Sudhir said in the past were manufacturing inefficiencies which comprised performance and reliability testing. To learn from that experience, Sudhir said they intentionally involved more people and build up a team of skilled engineers who could continue to help the team for years to come.
The team conducted tests at the Stellantis automaker’s full scale wind tunnel in Auburn Hills, Michigan. They were given a day and a half of testing time, allowing them the opportunity to test different parametrizations of the vehicle.
“A large project this year was adjusting our CFD setup to correlate data from this wind tunnel test,” Sudhir said. “It was a great exercise for all of us to more deeply understand how our simulations work and what their strengths are.”
Sudhir said the team also did testing at World Wide Technology Raceway, a track near St. Louis which is used by Indy and Nascar.
“We were able to learn some key information about reliability and vehicle performance. I was personally very happy that we were able to run a full competition simulation. We received a lot of driver feedback about aero balance and that gave us some confidence that in terms of overall vehicle setup we were headed in the right direction.”
According to Sudhir, the testing at WWTR was perhaps the most important day of testing all year, not just for the aerodynamics subsystem, but because it benefited the whole team.
Illini Motorsports is a registered student organization that draws its members from over 20 academic majors. The group recently merged with Illini Formula Electric to become Illini Electric Motorsports.