Bruin Formula Racing

Technical Director - Cockpit & Electronics (May 2023 - Present)
Controls Responsible Engineer - Shifting (June 2022 - May 2023)
Controls Manufacturing Lead (June 2021 - June 2022)
Controls & Electronics Member (September 2020 - June 2021)

Los Angeles, CA
2020-Present

Mechanical Design, Vehicle Controls, Machining, Manufacturing, Electrical Design

I joined BFR in my freshman year during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the team, I focused primarily on the Controls & Electronics subteams. For my freshman through junior, my main focus was on the design of a pneumatic shifting system, which was successfully implemented on Mk8, competing in May of 2023.

I am currently the technical director for the team, focusing on the Cockpit and Electronics subteams. The team is in a major transitional year from Internal Combustion Cars (from Mk. 1 to Mk.8) to our first fully Electric Vehicle (Mk. 9). My role primarily lies in integration and systems engineering as well as overall project management. I have developed tools in software platforms such as Notion for project management as well as part management. I am also working on leading the High Voltage safety program for our team in order to manage and reduce risk around high voltage electronics. On the technical side I am working on the physical integration of Low Voltage as well as designing system engineering structure for the design, verification and validation of the vehicle as a whole.

In my third year, I held the role of Controls Responsible Engineer on the shifting subsystem, but the role was more multifaceted than that title. I helped co-lead the controls subteam and worked on the Driver Safety subsystem. In the process of designing for pneumatic shifting, I led multiple members and worked with multiple subteams to make sure the system integrated as flawlessly as possible and improved driving ergonomics. The shifting system ran without failures in the 2023 Michigan May FSAE competition, resulting in a 0.19s reduction in acceleration time, as well as a team best 10th place (out of 112 teams that scored points).

Pneumatic Shifting

Starting in my freshman year, I have been working on the design for a pneumatic shifting system. The first task within that involved researching the required components to achieve targeted shift forces and shifting count. Working with multiple other senior members I was able to come up with an initial design.

This design, while flawed, was a step in the right direction. Some key points that have been improved upon for the system that will be installed on our 2023 car versus the system that was designed for the 2022 car are the electrical board moving from an isolated board designed by me to a board designed in collaboration with the electronics subteam that handles both shifting and data logging. Another key improvement was the mounting, from a vehicle-mounted piston to a self-contained system entirely mounted on the engine.

The initial built design, while operable didn’t have enough shifts and struggled with consistency. Recalculating using different resources & with testing, the tank and piston were both upsized. These systems, were then tuned, to a point where the drivers felt that they were a huge leap forwards. Driver feedback is the best validator of a system such a shifting, and all of the competition Autocross, Acceleration, and Endurance drivers felt that the effect of it was hugely positive.

At competition, the shifting system ran without flaws during all dynamic, although had a relatively major failure in the pneumatic regulator after autocross, the evening before endurance. The failure was trace to be likely due to repeated heating on a component not properly designed for the environments that it was exposed to. We got very lucky and were able to find a local paintball shop which had the part which enabled us to run in competition, scoring us a team best result.

Project Management

It is often said that FSAE is not an engineering competition but a project management competition. Working with large teams (in our case a team of 50 to over 100) can lead to communication challenges and significant integration challenges when subteams realize that their designs don’t integrate either with other subteams or with the overall vehicle goals.

To combat a lot of these project management issues I have introduced tools, primarily using Notion for project management, requirements traceability, parts tracking and safety. The project management designed to manage the assignment of responsibility to members and track their progress within tasks. This can be viewed in multiple ways both through tables, boards and calendars allowing for ease of use.

The requirements traceability is designed to track system goals from the top vehicle level all the way down to individual components. This is helpful to make sure design criteria set early are verified in the process of testing the car to ensure that the car has met the goals set early on in design. This lets us generally verify that all the design decisions we make can be linked to overall vehicle goals

Safety management is also an incredibly important part especially as a team transitioning to an EV platform, where safety risk goes from relatively minimal to something where significant more caution is required. With SOPs, training and certification we are able to document access to certain machines and parts to minimize risk to only well trained people in controlled situations

Driver Safety & Cockpit

For Mk. 8 I took up work on the driver safety design, focusing on making the CAD designs manufacturable. I also had to gain a deeper grasp of the rules and requirements for the safety systems on the vehicle. The main part I adapted towards manufacturability was the firewall, which required near ground-up design using sheet metal CAD, to then be adaptable to multiple manufacturers’ bend specifications. I had to redesign this multiple times, because of unconsidered rules by the engineer who originally designed the system, coming up with a system that was praised by technical inspectors for how simple it was

I also worked with wheels & steering and the drivers to spec a steering wheel and design the mounts for the shift paddles to integrate back into the shifting subsystem.

Vehicle Testing & Running

Through Mk7 and Mk8’s testing processes, I have been consistently on deck to help smoothen the process of running a racecar. With Mk.7 this primarily entailed minor controls fixes. Mk8 this scope increased immensely.

My primary goal with Mk8 was to validate and optimize the pneumatic shifting system. Competition was the crux of all this effort and two major fixes had to be implemented on the fly. The first was that shifting was not working during the first 3 accel runs. Before the final run, we made the snap judgment call to make a significant code change that would reduce data collection, and change tuning parameters. This led to the best run time of 4.67s. The second was when the tank blew out the evening before endurance. I was able to find a local paintball supply store quickly and communicate the issue, leading to the issue being fixed and us being able to run and finish endurance in 5th place, leading to an overall finish of 10th out of 120 teams.