Design of a carbon fiber monocoque for high performance car

The 004C from Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus is the only vehicle in the GT class to be based on a carbon fiber monocoque. This vehicle has been designed to comply with the GT3 regulations that is a category of vehicles derived from road legal versions. The car is created to compete in the most iconic endurance races, like the 24 hours of Nürburgring, requiring a high level of engineering technique and experience. The monocoque together with the roll-cage are responsible for the safety and the dynamic performance of the vehicle, giving their contribution to the overall torsional stiffness. This document will go through the design flow used to design the carbon fiber monocoque explaining the complex mix between costs, weight and performance targets along with regulations and safety constraints. All the information explained in the following pages has been gathered directly from the same study made to develop and produce the real vehicle. Deriving from a three seaters road legal car, with the central driving position, and starting from a blank page, the evaluation of the shape and internal components layout has been performed preliminary. Using structural analysis based on the toughest load cases taken from the previous years track activity, the best layup has been selected between different combinations of carbon fiber plies and core materials. This has been correlated with the design of every single structural attachment insert ensuring the desired strength and stiffness. After that the attention will be focused on the FEM analysis performed for the homologation requirements, from front impact crash test, passing through the safety cage verification up to the lateral crash. In fact, being the 004 project a very exotic and limited batch size production car,the safety of the vehicle is evaluated, in the first stage, only on virtual tests, that had a very strong correlation with reality. The proof of this interrelationship will be verified accordingly to the US homologation physical tests, performed just before the start of production of the road legal car. The aim of the last part is to describe the manufacturing and assembly phases, which despite all are one of the most important processes that guarantee the success of a project. As a final remark it is important to underline that the entire process from design to track operations has been managed by an Italian company, Podium Engineering, where I'm directly involved.