Cruisers are multi-occupant solar vehicles that are conceived to compete in long-range (over 3,000 km) solar races based on the best compromise between the energy consumption and the payload. They must comply to the race's rules regarding the overall dimensions, the solar panel size, functionality, and safety and structural requirements, while the shape, the materials, the powertrain, and the mechanics are considered at the discretion of the designer. In this work, the most relevant aspects of the structural design process of a full-carbon fiberreinforced plastic solar vehicle are detailed. In particular, the protocols used for the design of the lamination sequence of the chassis, the leaf springs structural analysis, and the crash test numerical simulation of the vehicle, including the safety cage, are described. The complexity of the design methodology of fiber-reinforced composite structures is compensated by the possibility of tailoring their mechanical characteristics and optimizing the overall weight of the car.
Video LinkThe video component of this article can be found at https://www.jove.com/video/58525/ A new design philosophy must be approached, including a different vision of material use and manufacturing. First, materials must be selected based on the highest strength-to-weight ratio and, as a direct consequence, carbon-reinforced fiber plastics represent an optimal solution. Furthermore, specific stratagems in the design must be implemented.In the present article, the procedures employed to design some of the most important structural parts of the solar vehicle, such as its monocoque chassis, the suspension, and even a computational crash test are depicted. The final scope is to obtain rapidly a solar vehicle with the least possible weight, in a trade-off with aerodynamics and race rules.
The current investigation was conducted on gres porcelain stoneware, a robust, impermeable and aesthetically pleasing type of ceramic mainly used for flooring, characterizing its resistance to bending and low-velocity impact, both representative efforts to which flooring tiles are constantly subjected as a consequence of the fall of objects and microsubsidences. The mechanical characterization was made through experimental tests following an adapted low-velocity impact testing routine, and the model was by validated numerical simulation through the explicit code software LS-DYNA based on the Johnson–Holmquist constitutive material model. Specimens were tested before and after an annealing cycle industrially used to allow porcelain folding. The thermal treatment demonstrated to infer a decrease in mechanical resistance on the material, understood as a consequence of its elevated maximum temperature and fast cooling rate. The numerical model calibrated successfully allows predicting the behavior of gres porcelain before and after annealing against low-velocity impact.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.