Front Upright

June 2025-Present

As part of the Northwestern Baja SAE team, I was tasked with designing the front upright—a critical component that connects the wheel, suspension, and steering systems. The primary challenge was to create a design that could withstand the extreme forces of an off-road race, such as jump landings and side impacts, while remaining as lightweight as possible. This is a currently ongoing project with a projected manufacturing and finish timeline of February 2026

Final CAD & Assembly

I built the upright as a fully parametric model, meaning it was driven by a core set of dimensions and geometric relationships. This parametric approach was crucial, allowing for rapid adjustments to key suspension parameters like track width or caster angle, with the model updating automatically. This ensured that any change made for strength or weight savings would not compromise the vehicle's handling performance. The final upright was a full 0.38 pounds lighter than last year's, representing a 20% decrease in the overall weight while staying structurally sound.

CAD Iterations

Iterative FEA

To validate the design virtually, I set up a Finite Element Analysis (FEA) study. I identified and simulated multiple worst-case scenarios based on real-world race conditions:

A vertical impact to simulate the force of landing a jump.

A side impact to simulate a collision or hitting a corner rut.

An angled impact to simulate an impact on the side of the tire

The initial analysis of the vertical impact, shown in the Factor of Safety (FOS) plot, was crucial. It revealed a critical failure point with a minimum Factor of Safety of just 0.22, indicating that the part would certainly fail under race conditions.

This FEA plot became a roadmap for optimization. It clearly identified the high-stress areas (shown in green and yellow) around the bearing bore and mounting points. My next steps were to strategically add material and reinforcing ribs to these specific locations while simultaneously removing unnecessary mass from the low-stress (deep blue) regions to save weight. This data-driven, iterative process of analyzing, reinforcing, and re-analyzing is key to creating a part that is both strong and lightweight.

Final FEA

After 6 iterations of my design, my final FEA studies passed all of the tests that I put them through. The vertical impact that initially failed at 0.22 now has a minimum FOS of 3.5, and the worst FEA study was the angled impact, where the minimum FEA hit 1.3, still staying above the minimum FEAs that our Baja technical requirements mandate. This FEA still highlights the areas of the weakest connections and highest chances of failure, I will keep these areas in mind for when I manufacture, ensuring that the finish on these areas is as smooth as possible to prevent any stress concentrations and keep my tolerancing as tight as possible.

Manufacturing & Next Steps

Now that my CAD and FEA are complete, it is now time for me to set up my CAM, so that I can machine a blank down into my upright on our 3-axis CNC mills. In order to do this, I will need to set up my blank and then be able to flip it around to machine the other side of it. This will be done by creating a fixture plate that can hold onto my bolt holes with +/1 0.001" using dowel pins and bolts.

Additionally, looking towards the future, I would want to iterate upon this idea in the upcoming years by looking into multi-material uprights, where they could be partially made of steel in order to reduce volume and potentially reduce weight. Another area to improve upon would be the simulations we run on the part, as our current simulations only evaluate singular max static forces, but we could massively improve our testing and evaluation by including dynamic modeling, perhaps in ANSYS or similar softwares.