Design And Lightweight Research Of FSC Racing Car Frame

FSC racing car frame is the primary structure which ensure that the racing car can finishthe games successfully and the driver’s life safety. Therefore, the design of FSC racing carframe should ensure the strength and stiffness of the car frame, and avoid the vicinity andcoincidence between the low frequency of FSC car frame and the frequency of the excitation.At the same time, the design should try to make the car frame have a small mass and acompact structure.In order to guarantee the driver’s life safety and driving comfort, and to satisfy therequirements of the layout of all parts and assemblies on the car frame, the design of theracing car frame should be considered under the structural rules of FSC racing car frame, autoergonomics and the racing car layout requirements. The initial wall thickness of the frame’ssteel tubes was chosen from the first generation FSC racing car frame. After completing thecar frame structure design, the racing car model was assembled and had interference checkedin3D software. The car frame parameterized finite element model was established in ANSYS,then strength analysis under different extreme working conditions, stiffness analysis andmodal analysis was done by using ANSYS. The analysis results show that the maximumstress of the frame is much less than the material yield limit and the deflection of the frame issmall. It can be also known that the stiffness of the car frame is sufficient and low ordernatural frequency distribution of the car frame is reasonable. The analysis results indicate thatthe car frame has room for mass optimization. The sensitivity analysis of the car frame’storsional stiffness, first order natural frequency and mass was done to find the designparameters which have significant influences on car frame’s torsional stiffness, first ordernatural frequency and mass. And then these design parameters were chosen as the designvariables in mass optimization analysis; torsional stiffness and first order natural frequency were chosen as state variables in mass optimization analysis; the mass of the car frame wasthe objective function. The other design parameters were set as standard values which is mostclose to the upper limit value of steel tube inner radius of FSC rule. Finally, the mass wasreduced6.1Kg.Some conclusions were obtained from the design of FSC car frame, the finite elementparametric modeling, the finite element analysis and optimization design. These conclusionscan be the reference and guidance in FSC car frame design and finite element analysis in thefuture.