Knowledge Bank

SAE competitions such as Baja SAE and Formula SAE offer undergraduate engineering students excellent preparatory experience for a career in the automotive sector. Students design and build race cars from scratch, but often do not have the necessary background knowledge to design vehicles that function optimally. Suspensions in particular are often left unanalyzed due to the difficulty posed by both graphical analysis and multibody kinematics packages. The experience gained by students would be much more valuable if they were able to easily analyze their designs. SLASIM, a new MATLAB-based program, attempts to provide a powerful yet user-friendly utility for the novice suspension designer. It is GUI-based and made freely available under the GNU General Public License. While not as powerful as commercially available kinematics packages, SLASIM is a useful tool for rapid design iteration. Finally, since it is open source, it provides an easy platform for modification and enhancement.