The team has improved the design of the exhaust headers and will provide Houston Muffler’s with the designs during the meeting with Houston Mufflers on February 5th, so they can choose the optimal headers for the exhaust. The team has already fabricated the parts that were needed to fix the stock exhaust, the flanges and the exhaust port couplers are ready to be welded together.
A block of Mild Steel has been donated by Blanson CTE High School Machine Shop to fabricate the flanges of the prototype exhaust system. FSAE will lend us the decibel meter that will be used for the validation of the muffler, referring to the reduction of noise and assuring that the exhaust does not 110 cdB at all velocities and 103 cdB at idle. And for the validation of reduction of weight a hand held weight scale has been provided by one of the team members to finalize the weight of the stock exhaust system after the missing pieces mentioned before have been welded. FSAE will also lend us a digital tachometer with a hall sensor included in the device to obtain the RPM values the engine undergoes during the engine performance validation process.
During the work period of February 4th to 17th, One of the firsts things the team will do is meet with Houston mufflers’ to weld the stock motorcycle exhaust in order to be able to complete benchmark testing. The final piece will be welded on February 5th and with that the stock exhaust will be ready for testing. While the stock exhaust is getting welded, the team will ask the welders at Houston Mufflers for any final feedback on the manufacturing side of the final design of the exhaust system.
Next, the team will conduct the necessary research to present three different options for torque sensors, necessary for validation, and present these to Dr. Chang with hopes for financial sponsorship of this tool from the Mechanical Engineering department of the University of Houston. The meeting is set to be Wednesday February 7th.
As stated before the final design for the exhaust system has been completed and with this the team is waiting for approval from professors who specialize in CFD for the analysis done by the team. This being said, the team is ready to move on to the manufacturing phase.
With that the team will finalize all orders and quotes for exhaust pipes needed to manufacture the new design. Lastly in the upcoming week the team will start looking into the different options for mounting the prototype into the chassis to avoid any clearance issues.
The team expects to encounter problems on fabricating the exhaust design due to the inaccurate 3D drawing of the engine with respect to reality. The 3D drawing of the engine, which includes the exhaust ports that will attach to the exhaust headers, was a draft made by a member from UH FSAE. The team expects that such accuracies from the 3D drawing will lead to problems when fabricating the intended design of the exhaust system specially on the degrees of bends that we are expecting. To mitigate this problem, the team has two different exhaust headers designs that change the location of the collectors in case the bends intended to fabricate are not feasible.
Another obstacle the team foresees is the exhaust pipe material not coming in time due to shipping complications, or not having sufficient material to modify any changes/mistakes done. The team is allocating more time in case of any inconvenience during the manufacturing process. Additionally, the team will use spare exhaust pipe material left from the previous FSAE projects in case there is a delay or insufficient material to save some time while we resolve the disruptions.
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