TGXX Rear Uprights

For the 2024 Baja car, I designed the rear suspension uprights. This part connects the upper, lower, and toe links to the wheel and creates an interface with the wheel bearing through which passes the stub axle. This part sees extremely variable and unpredictable loads, so must be designed with robust load cases and FEA setup, and a very high factor of safety.

This part also interfaces with many other components on the car from the subsystems of drivetrain, brakes, and suspension. Checking clearances and ensuring proper fitment was very important to the design of this part.

I was able to reduce the weight of the part by 14.7% compared to the 2023 car while maintaining a factor of safety of over 1.2 for all load cases. I used Ansys FEA software to analyze over 10 iterations of the component to maximize strength while minimizing weight. I also performed bolted joint calculations on the mounting points to ensure that the bolts we are using are the lightest possible while maintaining adequate factor of safety to yielding.

During the competition season, there were zero part failures and the same set of uprights were able to be run for all three competitions, completing over 20 hours of hard driving.