Composite Footplate
A structural sandwich-panel footplate for the Baja SAE car, three plies of carbon fiber per face over a Nomex honeycomb core, sized with FEA and proven with physical bend testing.
The footplate carries the driver's foot loads while the car pounds through desert terrain, so it needed high stiffness-to-weight and reliable impact behavior. I modeled the panel as a composite sandwich in ANSYS ACP, applying representative foot loading to compare deflection and failure indices across core and face options.
To validate the simulation I fabricated four candidate sandwich configurations (carbon/Nomex, carbon/balsa, fiberglass/Nomex, and fiberglass/wood) and ran three-point bend tests on each. The carbon/Nomex layup gave the best stiffness-to-weight, matching the analytical ranking, and became the final design.
- Composite sandwich modeled in ANSYS ACP under driver foot loading
- Four candidate layups fabricated and bend-tested head-to-head
- Carbon/Nomex selected for best stiffness-to-weight
- Installed on the competition vehicle for the 2025 season
