Berkeley Formula Racing

Engine Subteam member

As Powertrain Lead for the Berkeley Formula Racing team I have been able to work on many critical component of the car. My first year on the team I developed a brand new dual radiator system to increase cooling efficiency by 25 percent. The last year I developed a baffle system for the fuel tank to reduce fuel slosh and starvation. This coming year I get to focus my time on leading the engine team to a sucessful season of abitious projects!

Cooling:

Here we can see the dual radiator cooling system that I developed in 2022. The blue silicon lines carry our coolant from the hot engine to the radiators where it is cooled and then sent back to the engine. Going to a dual radiator system over a single one offered many benefits such as improved cooling , drag reduction, and improved weight balance. This past year I also helped spearhead a move to hardlines made from 5052 aluminum. This change reduced the weight of the cooling system by 4lbs.

Fueling

Due to the high G forces that the car sustains during cornering the fuel inside the fuel tank experiences tremendous slosh. From the fluid simulation on the right we can see that it leaves one side of the tank, the sump, completely dry during a turn. The sump is where our fuel pump is located, which meant the fuel slosh created fuel starvation. This starvation created a danger of the car stalling, and reduced laptimes by 6-10 seconds. I have addressed this issue by implementing a gated baffle system that only allows fuel to travel towards the fuel pump. This limits slosh almost completely and ensures we have fuel at all times. While this approach did see beneficial effects to combat fuel starvation we want to completely eliminate starvation this coming year. In order to tackle that problem I am developing a system that utilizes a fuel mat and an external fuel pump, along with the baffles from last year.

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Custom LV Battery

After a 4 month long Co-Op at Tesla with their battery engineering team I was eager to apply what I had learned to the Berkeley Formula Racing Car. I settled on the project of designing a fully custom LV battery pack would be a comprehensive way to achieve this. Creating a LV battery for a IC car comes with interesting requirements, because of the engine and fuel we use, the current demanded from the starter motor is quite high(70 Amps) and the time that we may be cranking(drawing current) is also quite high(60s). This presents two large challenges, one, how can you spec appropriate sized busbars while maintaining the size requirements. And two, how can you connect the cells to these busbars. To first understand how heat was generated in a busbar I wrote a matlab script that would take the material, size of busbar, current, and time and calculate the temperature that the busbar would reach. This gave me a way to analyze various busbar geometries and materials and stay within my set factor of saftey. From there I decided that spot welding pure nickle to the cells was the most cost effective way to connect them to a busbar. Spot welding has the advantage of being incredibly cheap, which for a self funded project was a main driver. After solving the busbar heat problem most of the work went into packaging and creating a safe design. I am happy to say that this project turned out incredibly well and was able to perform it's duty as the LV battery on the car many times.

This was the first one I designed! It was manufactured for the 2025 car

This is Rev 2! Most of the improvements are size and safety

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