V2 Superbike Frame
Washington Superbike
October 2021 – June 2022
In autumn of 2021 I joined Washington Superbike at the University of Washington, a competitive engineering club with the mission of designing and manufacturing a 100% electric moto gp bike to race at international competition.
Objective
My largest project on the team was being one half of the 2-person structural team tasked with researching and designing a frame for our next-generation model of the bike to improve upon the first. This was one of the first, large-scale engineering problems I had ever encountered, so for the first time, I dove into exploring what it meant to design a structural component of a larger dynamic machine, researching geometry, industry standards, competition requirements, and extreme load cases, all to inform our design and shape what characteristics it needed to have.
Ultimately further steps were paused after new leadership decided to shift focus to get the first-generation bike running again.
Partially assembled first generation bike in the pit
Design Features
- High performance frame
- Weight reduction through unnecessary material removal
- Heavy
- Simple to weld
- Easier to source
- Additional weight reduction
- New experience with different manufacturing methods
Second-generation frame design with competition standard electric motor
Challenges
With most industry leading company design information & research being private it was difficult to find strong evidence or data to back up our design decisions. Important geometric details such as the rake angle, wheelbase, and center of mass. Our main method became noting the design choices on bikes made by Honda, Ducatti, Zero, and similar companies, and then essentially thinking backward using mathematical and physical concepts we’d learned in class to try and explain why they may have made the choices they did. Further, then weighing those reasonings we used them to inform our design and explain our thoughts in our design reviews.
Weight
One of our main goals was to reduce the weight compared to the first-generation frame. While functional, it is overbuilt and to lower cost and improve performance, we sought to make a lighter frame. However, we ran into several setbacks in this exploration. For example, we had been looking into designing for and manufacturing an aluminum frame, but after the initial stage, we eventually concluded that we did not yet have the material donations & funding, or the welding experience in our club to be able to reliably manufacture an aluminum frame in this design cycle.
Finite Element Analysis
Our club also lacked extensive knowledge of FEA. Using Asys we spent 20+ hours researching, reaching out to professors, and playing with the software to improve our meshing techniques and our load case simulations. While time-consuming and sufficiently frustrating, it made a notable learning experience
Key Takeaways
- Communication & Collaboration within an engineering team dividing work and learning from each other
- How to Consider & Design for extreme load cases
- Approaching/Analyzing large scale engineering problems
- Initial SolidWorks & Ansys skills and intuition