2008 Drive Train
Team Members: Adam Collins, Ryan Robison
Design History
For 2008 the team in charge of the drive train decided to do a redesign of a critical component of a previous year’s transmission. The team in 2005 had designed, by Adam Collins’ account, “a well made toroidal transmission.” The failing point in the design of the transmission, however, was the linear gear mechanism used to shift the transmission. The linear shifting actuation was prone to sticking because of friction between parts and the weakness of the actuator, making the shifting malfunction at times. Adam Collins took on this portion of the project and decided to replace the linear actuator with a DC motor to overcome this short coming. Furthermore, Adam had determined that the code was not sufficiently robust to control the toroidal transmission in all situations so he set about writing better code for the controller.
In the Fall of 2007, Adam and Ryan spent their time contructing and testing the controller and code they were going to use to control the transmission. Starting in the spring of 2008 Adam contructed the gearing that went between the transmission and the DC motor that controlled it. Fine tuning of the system in the car went to the beginning of April.
Design Intent
The design intent of the redesign itself was to improve an existing design by making it more reliable than the previous iteration. The overall design intent of the toroidal transmission was to ensure the engine RPMs ran so that the engine provided peak power at all times. The transmission would continually shift maintaining the same engine RPMs in order to achieve this.
Construction
The initial controller design steps can be seen in the Microcontroller CFP section. After the completion of that initial prototype at the beginning of December contruction of the gearing between the rotary actuator and the transmission shifting rod began. At first Adam found that the actuator he was using initially was too weak and he had to upgrade it to a more powerful model.