This module sucks and I'm sorry, but it is the most important step in the process. The fun stuff will come soon I promise 😊. Please make a new section in your document entitled Brake Pedal DesignResearch. This marks the beginning of your Introductory Project!
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Design Process Overview
This squiggle serves as a good representation of our design process. It starts as a vague set of requirements for a vehicle, guided by the rules. We take our understanding of the rules and functional requirements, do some research on how a set of similar constraints are addressed elsewhere, both in the competition and other industries, and then start to refine our ideas. We take these ideas and create concepts/sketches. Then we do a quick team review of our findings, check to see if we think we are heading in the right direction, adjust if necessary, and continue on our design path.
Functional Requirements
When designing the car, we always need to think about the objectives for our designs. As mentioned before, your first project is to design a brake pedal. Before you design the brake pedal, you need to think about exactly what a brake pedal does functionally, and why we have one.
Project Deliverable:Write down what you think the brake pedal is and why it is important. This may seem like a simple exercise, but try to think about the mechanics of a brake pedal, and what alternatives could exist but aren’t used. This will inform your thoughts on what the function of the pedal is. (Hint: Google how hydraulic braking systems work)
Rules Requirements
Our goal first and foremost is to pass technical inspection at our two competitions. We cannot score points in any dynamic events if we do not pass technical inspection.
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The short and sweet of it is that the rules are painful to navigate, especially given there are two rulesets to check. As you spend more time on the team, you will become intimately familiar with the rules, but for now, we are going to teach you to sift through the rules. Open the most recent versions both the FSAE and Formula Hybrid Rules (2025).
FSAE Electric - Michigan International Speedway (Brooklyn MI)
Competition Website:
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Rules and Series Documents:
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Formula Hybrid and Electric - New Hampshire Motor Speedway (Loudon, NH)
Competition Website:
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Rules:
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To find rules that pertain to your system, the first step is to check the table of contents for anything that may relate to your system. For the Brake Pedal, we are going to look for the section labeled brakes.
Project Deliverable:Find rules pertaining to Search for rules regarding the Brake Pedal Design and Location. Write down the force value that the pedal needs to withstand without failure .from both FSAE and FORMULA HYBRID
CTRL F is a great way to find what you need, but be careful, it can often times miss rules that apply to the system, but don’t mention it by name!
There are other rules that don't directly mention the Brake Pedal or Pedal Box, as is the case with many other systems on the car. Some components are required to be placed within specific envelopes in the car, but are not called by name. When you are doing rules , however we will not worry about those for the sake of this project. Please feel free to explore the rules more to get yourselves comfortable, as you will need to use them again quite soon.
Inspiration Sources
To help you in the concepting process, we want to search for places where we can find inspiration. The best places to start are other FSAE teams, but other sources can include professional racing teams and consumer automobiles.
Other FSAE teams will come up with ideas that we may not have thought of, and while copying a design bolt for bolt is not in the spirit of the competition, gaining inspiration from other designs is a great way to inform our process.
Project Deliverable: Find at least 10 sources of inspiration for the design of the brake pedal, find 6 from other FSAE teams and 4 from various other sources. We usually would like to collect more than this, but for now this will suffice. Citing your sources is important, but we don't require that it be in a specific format. Just past a link, and maybe write a quick caption to help yourself quickly remember where its from.
Concepting
The next step in the process is to start coming up with concepts for what the brake pedal might look like. The initial process of concepting consists of sketching with notes explaining what the concept is trying to portray. This is the part in the process where you are trying to get across as much information as possible, while investing as little time as possible.
This part of the process often includes some preliminary hand calculations to inform the geometry of the parts. For the sake of the project, lets assume that we want to have a pedal ratio of 6, so we want the force at the drivers foot to be 6 times less than the force pushing on the brake cylinder. If you do your force/moment balance equations, this will yield a ratio of the distance from the pivot point of 6:1, meaning we want the pedal face to be 6 times further from the pivot than the cylinder attachment point.
Project Deliverable: Come up with 3-5 concept sketches, with notes explaining the rational behind the design concepts. Send them to your system head once you are done.
Reviews
When you are doing research for any given project, it is imperative to check with multiple people to ensure that no rule is being missed or misinterpreted. Not only this, but you may be missing concepting ideas that you may not have thought of.
To ensure that our understanding of the rules and function of the system is correct, we perform research reviews for each system before we actually start in depth design. Your document that you have been creating thus far throughout Module 2 is essentially what you would present through the research phase. The only added information that you would provide in an actual review is the pros/cons for each concept, as well as a project budget and timeline estimate. From there, a decision can be made for the direction of the project, but for the sake of time, we will be skipping this section for now.
Congratulations, you have now completed Module 2!