Coolant Outlet for Chippewa Racing

Last crawled date: 1 year, 10 months ago

I am a member of Chippewa Racing, Central Michigan University's Formula SAE team. Each year we design an build a small, formula-style race car in competition with universities from around the world.

This is a coolant outlet designed to fit our car's Yamaha R6 Sportbike engine. By changing the direction of the hose connection the team is able to remove over a foot of coolant hose. This will make our car lighter and the packaging of the engine neater.

This is a challenging part to manufacture conventionally. It's irregular shape does not lend itself well to subtractive manufacturing processes as it would require complex workholding and several operations. The original part was cast, but that would require the team to produce a mold, which would eat up valuable time for a small team. The tooling for both of these methods would be prohibitive for a team that prides itself on delivering high performance at a low cost, as shown by our second-place finish in the cost event at FSAE Michigan 2017.

Additive manufacturing is an excellent choice for high performance products such as our car. It will allow the part to be lightweight and strong with a smooth finish to facilitate coolant flow. Since the part will be mounted directly to the engine block, a high temperature resin is necessary. This could be achieved by manufacturing using ULTEM 1010 on a Stratasys Fortus 480mc 3D printer.