PW Human Powered Vehicle Design Team

HPVDT - Mechanical Design Lead

Goal: safe, fast and sustainable human-powered transportation

I was an active member of the Human-Powered-Vehicle-Design-Team (HPVDT) since the start of my studies at UofT. In 2014, I moved up to the role of mechanical design lead. During this period I was primarily responsible for overseeing design and fabrication of mechanical systems of Viteza, our entry into the 2015 ASME Human Powered Vehicle Competition. My experience with the team built the foundation of my technical engineering skills and refined my hands-on abilities from very early in my degree.

Viteza was a fully custom partially-fared low-sitting carbon-fibre recumbent bicycle with a carbon leaf spring fork. The team designed and built it for the 2015 ASME HPVC, an urban-transportation oriented student team event hosted in Gainesville, FL. Vehicles were evaluated on the basis of being appropriate urban-transportation vehicles; speed, load transportation, and endurance were each judged through a series of races and presentations. As the team's mechanical design lead I was primarily responsible for the power transmission and steering systems, but I participated in every step in creating a race-ready custom carbon bicycle. This included vehicle design idealization, conceptual design, subsystem detailed design, parts sourcing, testing, documentation, and a whole lot of sanding. I also traveled down to Florida to provide support to the race team and to race in the endurance event.

The UofT team achieved a very respectable 5th overall at the event, as well as first place in the design category.

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Valkyrie was a front wheel driven leaning delta trike, with cantilever supported rear disc wheels the team built in my first year of involvement for the 2014 ASME HPVC. As a junior member I was tasked with designing and fabricating a set of lightweight aerodynamic disc wheels for Valkyrie, the team's 2014 vehicle. Given the time constraints and my inexperience I vouched for a design that was very simple to analyze and fabricate. I used a flat foam-carbon sandwich disc to attach the rim to the wheel hub. The carbon was modelled with alternating weave directions using the surface feature in Solidworks. The Solidworks simulation toolkit was utilized to reinforce critical regions of the structure.

The result were excellent - my wheels were much lighter than any other disc wheel the team had built. They ran true and were very balanced. The team achieved 3rd place in the speed event and 7th overall.