FEATURE AUTOMOTIVE & MOTORSPORT
HELPING CARDIFF RACING MAKE HISTORY NI improvements have helped Cardiff Racing move from mid table in 2015 to pole
position in 2017, beating 100 other universities to win Formula Student at Silverstone
decision on how to iterate the designs to boost performance. NI has been used to measure key vehicular attributes, including everything from engine temperatures to wishbone strain to wing deflection.
N
ational Instruments (NI) technology, sponsorship and support has assisted
Cardiff Racing in its rapid ascent through the rankings of one of the most competitive academic auto sport events in the world: Formula Student UK at the Silverstone Race Track. Cardiff Racing are a formula student team made up from engineering students at Cardiff University. Over the past three years, NI technology has empowered several in-vehicle innovations to improve Cardiff Racing’s performance and driver experience. NI technologies were also used for recording data on the track and on the test-bench, to help the team intelligently iterate its car designs. These incremental improvements have driven the team from mid table in 2015 to pole position in 2017, beating 100 other universities to win Formula Student at Silverstone, becoming the first UK winners in the competition’s 19-year history.
INCREMENTAL PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
Cardiff Racing has been sponsored by NI for the past three years. NI sponsorship has granted the team access to cutting edge data acquisition and embedded technologies, which have played an increasingly vital role within both the team’s vehicle and test benches. Some NI based systems have been
installed in-vehicle, boosting both performance and driver experience. In 2017, Cardiff Racing integrated two major innovations into the car: electronic clutch by wire, using a myRIO and a high torque servo; and a custom driver display, using an sbRIO and the Amulet display. Other NI systems have given the team access to a world of data and insight, allowing Cardiff Racing to better understand the car and make an informed
14 FEBRUARY 2018 | INSTRUMENTATION
Tom Pryce, Wales’ only ever Formula One race winner, was a great inspiration to the team. As such, they wanted to race in his memory - by naming the car ‘Gwyneth’, after his mother, and mimicking his racing colours
INNOVATION ONE: ELECTRONIC CLUTCH BY WIRE Cardiff Racing designed and developed a novel method of actuating a clutch lever on a Formula Student race car. The system uses a position controlled servo motor to grant the driver full control of the clutch. The mechanism replaced the manual operation of the clutch by the driver, to ensure the fastest possible downshifting and launch acceleration. The servo motor chosen was the Hitec
HS-1100WP due to compatibility with the 12V rail available on the car. In addition, the servo provides a high torque output (8.24Nm) at a speed of 0.26s to get from zero to 60 degrees. To control the position of the servo, a potentiometer was attached to a paddle and mounted directly on the steering wheel, which can be seen along with the gear up and down controls in the above schematic. The NI myRIO controller was used to tie these components together, executing a LabVIEW real-time application. The Electronic Clutch system works well.
The servo is able to quickly disengage/ reengage the clutch, enabling swift downshifting and improved acceleration.
INNOVATION TWO: CUSTOM DRIVER DISPLAY
Cardiff Racing became the first British team to win Formula Student
After the successful use of the myRIO for wireless telemetry and datalogging in CR12 (last year’s car), the team wanted to extend the capability of the
system to add additional inputs, additional sensors and make it so it can interface with the full colour, touch screen HMI from Amulet Technologies. As such, Cardiff Racing decided to port its code from the myRIO to a sbRIO 9637, which provide further processing power, additional inputs and built in support for CAN and RS232 protocols, which were required for commutation to the Amulet display. It took the team very little time to bring the existing code onto the new sbRIO controller. It was easy to extend the code to interpret CAN messages from the ECU to identify pertinent information (such as current temperatures, gear, and speed), before transmitting them with RS232 to visualise the live car data to the driver.
THE RESULTS
Throughout the weekend of Formula Student, Cardiff Racing’s building and engineering skills were put to the test as the car went under serious scrutiny by the judges, before the team took the car onto the track to perform several speed and agility tests. Once all the judging was complete, Cardiff Racing were crowned Class 1 Champions. Aside from the overall win, Cardiff
Racing won four additional trophies: Sprint Winners; the Bosch Award for Best Braking System; the Exxon Mobil Innovation Award for the aerodynamic exhaust design; and the Jaguar Landrover Virtual Engineering Award. The Virtual Engineering Award, judged by engineers from Jaguar Landrover, looked for innovative use of software for design and technology development. The team’s LabVIEW based electronic clutch (myRIO) and driver display systems (sbRIO) played a crucial role in securing the award. With JLR also commending the data driven approach to design iteration.
CONCLUSION In total, more than 2,000 students from 24 countries took part in the event. Cardiff Racing beat teams from 100 prestigious universities, to be crowned the 2017 champions and the first British team to win the competition.
NI
www.ni.com Cardiff Racing
www.cardiffracing.co.uk
/ INSTRUMENTATION
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