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Mechanical engineering major Mathew Ingraham ’06 (Guilford, Conn.) was only five years old when he performed his first oil change – on his mom’s car, with his dad’s help. All sorts of other work followed.
“My family has always been sort of a car family,” he says, explaining that his father is a former mechanic. “I’ve done pretty extensive engine work, body work, and fiberglassing. I’ve done most of the repair stuff that you can do on a car.”
It seemed natural for Ingraham to want to take that experience a step further and build a car.
Igraham, joined by 13 other senior mechanical engineering majors and about six juniors and sophomores, is doing just that this year as part of the College’s Formula SAE car team.
Headed by Ingraham, the team is building a three-quarter-scale Formula 1 racecar that will be entered in the Society of Automotive Engineers’ Formula SAE West competition, to be held June 14-17 at California Speedway in Fontana, Calif.
Ingraham says the competition includes an autocross course, skid-pad test, acceleration, braking, design judging, and safety inspection.
The group began the year with the help of advisers Scott Hummel, associate professor of mechanical engineering, and Jeffrey Helm, assistant professor of mechanical engineering.
This spring, Helm is serving as the team’s lone adviser as Hummel spends the semester with Lafayette engineering students in a study-abroad program at Vesalius College in Brussels, Belgium.
“This team started to come together at the end of last year,” Helm says, explaining that several of this year’s seniors, including Ingraham, participated on a team last year that built a car but did not enter the competition. “The overall concept of this is that we’re creating a prototype open-wheeled car that would be used by hobbyist racers. The students are judged as much on their design and the capabilities of the car as on its actual performance.”
Helm says the seniors, who are participating as part of their two-semester mechanical engineering “capstone” experience, are getting the opportunity to work on the sort of long-term project that they would be asked to handle as working engineers.
“As they go through school, they get a lot of opportunities, but everything seems to be in relatively small chunks,” he says. “This gives them a chance to really tackle a problem that has a fairly large degree of complexity.”
Erin Githens ’06 (Glen Ridge, N.J.) a member of the team’s suspension and steering crew, says participating has helped her hone her time-management skills and ability to work on a team.
“I have enjoyed the freedom of making decisions for ourselves, and also the ability to use the knowledge we’ve gained over the past four years to actually construct something we can drive,” she says. “The biggest challenge so far has been finding time between my other classes and activities to work on the car.”
Ingraham says that while team members have faced a number of challenges, including an engine that wouldn’t run properly because of a faulty sensor, he’s confident that it will finish the competition, a feat that about half of all entrants haven’t achieved in previous years.
“Our car is basically being designed to be as reliable as we can get it,” he says, explaining that cars that don’t finish the event often have overly complicated designs. “We’re trying to keep everything as simple and reliable as possible. We’re not really worried if the car’s heavy. Just finishing the event is what we want.”
Ingraham, who plans to pursue a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Clarkson University, is a member of the HAVEN substance-free living group and coach and former member of the varsity fencing team. He has interned at the Lee Co. in Westbrook, Conn., during parts of the past two summers and during interim semesters, and participated last summer in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experience for Undergraduates program at Clarkson University.
Githens is captain of the Equestrian Team and studied in Greece and Italy during the January interim semester.