Engineering - FSAE MY24 — Sehar's Portfolio

MIT Motorsports (Formula SAE) - MY24 Cooling System

MIT Motorsports (Formula SAE EV)
Cambridge, MA
July 2023 - June 2024
helloAs Cooling Lead for MIT Motorsports, I designed and built our electric vehicle’s water-cooling system from scratch to prevent the motor, inverter, and custom 7.7 kWh battery from overheating. This redesign replaced a system that had not been updated in 5+ years. Overall, I was responsible for: 1) determining the architecture of our cooling loops; 2) sizing, sourcing, and designing components; and 3) developing test methods and conducting testing to empirically characterize component specs and validate module and system level designs.

Figure 1: Assembled car without aero components

Figure 2: Cooling system layout and major components

helloI conducted detailed thermal-fluid analyses, such as cross-flow heat exchanger calculations, battery thermal resistivity modeling, and coolant flow behavior and pressure drop characterizations, to properly size our radiators, fans, pumps, and tubes. Furthermore, I developed a cooling simulation to predict heat accumulation over 200 cycles of the cooling loop. This was done to understand our risk of overheating and to optimize the parameters that influence radiator design.
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Figure 3: Dual-loop architecture

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Figure 4: Battery thermal resistivity model

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Figure 5: Bench testing setup for pressure drop and thermal resistance testing

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Figure 6: Battery pressure drop data

Figure 7: Radiator cooling simulation to model heat accumulation over 200 cycles of cooling

Additionally, I designed custom swirl pots and fan shrouds and led the prototyping and testing to efficiently iterate on these designs. At last summer’s FSAE competition in Michigan, our design was validated. The motor, inverter, and battery did not overheat and temperatures remained within operating specs. During the endurance race, when the battery started approaching 60ºC, we power-limited to 30kW as per our design and saw the temperature drop by 4ºC within one lap of approximately 1 km.

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Figure 8: One of 4 main swirl pot designs and its fluid flow simulation

Figure 9: Final swirlpot

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Figure 10: Fan shroud design and final CAD

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Figure 11: Manufactured fan shroud

helloThe MY24 cooling system design is thoroughly documented in the MY24 Cooling Design Binder.

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