LSU TigerRacing Formula SAE

Baton Rouge, LA

Formula SAE is an international collegiate engineering design competition. Students must design and build an open wheeled formula style race car completely from scratch each year to compete against other teams from around the world. Teams are judged on their engineering analysis, manufacturing quality, cost efficiency, and vehicle performance.

As a member of LSU’s Formula SAE team, TigerRacing, I gained valuable hands-on engineering experience and was able to apply concepts from the classroom into a real life application. During my first year on the team, I was in charge of designing the engine’s cooling system. This involved calculating the engine’s total heat load, designing radiator size and hose routing to integrate with the car’s frame, body, and other systems, determining necessary coolant and air flow rates for water pump and fan selection, and contacting vendors to produce the custom parts.

During my second year, I helped to deign the team’s first ever aerodynamics package including multi-element front and rear wings. This was done by a team of five seniors as a Capstone Design project. The project involved extensive use of computational fluid dynamics to determine the airfoil profile and configuration that would yield the highest cost to benefit ratio. As the first team to design an aerodynamics package for TigerRacing, we also laid the foundation for future years to build off of our findings and improve the car even further.