Curtin Motorsport Team: CMT17

Curtin University Formula SAE Team

We are an FSAE-Australasian team who recently competed in the 2016 Formula Student competition in Melbourne with great success alongside other University teams. The team mainly consists of undergraduate Mechanical, Electrical and Mechatronic Engineers from Curtin University that design, test, and develop a combustion race car each year for the Formula Student Competition.

Recent Achievements

In 2016, we achieved the following:

·         3^rd place finish in the combustion category

·         4^th place finish overall out of the 32 teams that attended the Australasian competition

·         10^th in the global world rankings out of over 500 teams

·         Highest world ranked, Australian combustion team

·         Best Sportsmanship Award

·         Heavyweight Champion Award

Community Outreach

As well as the competition, CMT is involved in numerous community outreach programs, both within Curtin and open days and talks in lectures to students, as well as career fairs in high schools.

Some of our recent examples include:

·         WEETBIX - Kids TRYAthelon volunteers

·         HBF Run for a Reason

·         Kalamunda Careers Expo

·         Cars 4 Kids

·         Curtin Open Day

Technical Details

We are one of the few FSAE teams that manufacture most of their electrical and electronic components from scratch. This year the main aspects of the electrical system will include the:

·         Power Distribution Module, used to control peripheral power to the various pumps and fans, as well as providing valuable diagnostics data

·         Safety shutdown circuits

·         Dashboard/Warning Display, giving the driver reliable information about how the car is performing mid race.

·         Strain gauge amplifiers, to provide valuable data for the mechanical team to validate their designs

·         Tyre Temperature Sensors, once again providing design validation, as well as vehicle setup and driver feedback data.

·         Battery, for remaining capacity and longevity information.

·         Telemetry Module, for live, trackside data readouts.

For this year’s car, we have made the design transition from 2-layered PCBs to 4-layered PCBs in order to reduce the overall size and packaging of all electronic components on the car. This enables the entire car to be lighter, smaller and thus more competitive.

We are also developing our first ever linux-based, customized datalogger which will be WiFi enabled, record all live CAN and analogue data and transmit it via our student built Telemetry module.

Any sponsorship from PCBWay would be greatly appreciated and extremely useful to help us complete our technical goals this year as well as increasing the quality of research we can do in the coming months. A sponsorship would greatly expand our research and development capabilities; providing a higher quality and more competitive racecar and most importantly improve the collective knowledge and experience of our team.