Preliminary Design Review Guidelines

Overall Goal:

  • To demonstrate that the preliminary design follows all system requirements and is feasible within resource, time, and manufacturing constraints

  • To establish a foundation for moving forward with detailed design and prove that the design is ready to proceed

  • By this time, all architectures are final. This review will discuss the architectures and design options that were considered and explain why the final architecture was chosen over the other options

  • Preliminary CAD should exist. We should have a general understanding of how each part of the car will look.

    • This allows advisors to have physical context for the choices we are making

  • System bounding boxes must be fixed after this point

  • Major system-design critical OEM components should be selected and validated

Validation:

  • Approach should be validated with proper hand-calcs and FEA

  • A discussion of how you found your inputs will be required to convince the audience that your analysis is correct

  • Explain why you used this methodology

Implementation Plan:

  • At the end of PDR, why you chose the design and how you will implement it/proceed with it should be defined

    • General manufacturing process/steps selected

Between PDR and CDR, all that should change is the optimization of designs. Weight savings, improving intra-system interfaces and repairability, more in-depth planning for manufacturing

System Deliverables:

Dynamics

Body

Electromechanical

Aeroshell

Dynamics

Body

Electromechanical

Aeroshell

Suspension

Suspension Type Selected
Hardpoints Finalized
Shock Selected
Shock-Pot Mounting
Motion Ratio, Spring Rate determined

Frame

Bounding Boxes Finalized
Roll Cage Finalized
Passing Frame Sim
Preliminary Tab Placements

Battery

Battery Layout Finalized

Aerodynamics

Top Shell Finalized
Initial Shell to Frame
Shell-to-Shell Options
Preliminary CFD Results
Pitot Tube Mounting

Unsprung

Brake Calipers Selected
Wheel Bearing Selected
IMU, Hall Effect Mounting

Enclosures

Enclosure Mounting Locations
Number of Enclosures Fixed
Waterproofing Plan

Steering

Ergo

Cooling

Composites

Wire Harnessing