MechGen Suspension is our latest iPad app. It is an ambitious design system for an independent suspension. The designer specifies the vehicle geometry, lower control arm, the wheel movement and camber gain. The system designs the upper control arm. If this is of interest, please contact me.
MechGen FG is now on the iPhone, thanks to the excellent work by Jeff Glabe and Kaustubh Sonawale.
UCI’s 2015 race team at the Winter Design Review. On the left is Zeta an all-electric Formula SAE racecar that will compete at the UCI Energy Invitational, and on the right is Savage which is a combustion engine driven FSAE racecar that will compete at FSAE Lincoln in Nebraska
The 2015 UCI Energy Invitational is scheduled for May 24, 2015 on UCI’s campus. Please have your raceteam contact Tanya Eberhard at tanya.e@uci.edu. We look forward to you joining us.
Select this link, Four-bar linkages, for a Geogebra book that illustrates linkages ranging from a lever to a crank-rocker that open a door. This includes the construction of a four-bar linkage that coordinates the open and closed positions with specific input crank angles, called a four-bar function generator. The iPad application, MechGen FG, computes four-bar […]
Mark Plecnik has applied his research on the design of six-bar linkage function generators to the challenge of a long travel independent suspension for an off-road vehicle. UCI race car engineering students built a 1/5 scale model of his latest design and compared its performance to his calculated design. For more detail see his video:
The aluminum body developed at Art Institute for our monocoque racecar Phantom on display in the Engineering Gateway building at UCI. Here is another look.
Profs. Carl Nelson and Anurag Purwar organized a Summer School on Kinematic Theory at the University at Buffalo, New York as part of the 2014 ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences. Please select this link to get access to all of the talks: Kinematics Summer School. Select this link for a YouTube playlist of the videos of each […]
Please select this link to open the Geogebra Book containing constructions of a number of interesting linkages. This is an introduction to the useful movement available with articulated systems.
Researchers at Disney Research Zurich provide yet an other design system with the goal of moving digital character design into physical form. This work by Vittorio Megaro (ETH Zurich) and Bernhard Thomaszewski (Disney Research Zürich) and their colleagues can be viewed as two-position synthesis of four-bar “joints” that connect bodies in a serial chain, which […]