'Team Asthraa Report' -BAJA SAE INDIA 2012
BAJA is an ambitious engineering project conducted annually by Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). It was started in 1976 in University of Carolina, USA as Mini-BAJA and it came to India in 2007, under the name, BAJA SAE INDIA. The objective of this competition is to provide SAE student members with a challenging project that involves planning, designing, manufacturing and marketing. A student must function as a team not only to design, build, test, promote and run a vehicle within the limits of the rules, but also to generate financial support for their project. This competition, conducted every year in January at NATRIP Auto testing Facility in Pithampur, Indore India directs the participants to “build an off road vehicle that should be easily commutable on a given rough, off road terrain”. The students are required to raise the financial assistance from the market and manage their educational priorities as well. The vehicle is to be manufactured according to a given set of rules as decided by the BAJA organizing committee.
Karpagam University, Coimbatore has participated in the competition this year. The brilliant minds of this University have performed well in the competition, bringing laurels to the University. Team is participating for the first time. The team was formed under the name of Team Asthraa.
The number of teams registered for the competition BAJA 2012, was initially 244, hence BAJA organizing committee kept a qualifying preliminary Virtual BAJA Competition, in which the teams were supposed to compete through their preliminary virtual vehicle designs.
Thus the team Asthraa formed in April 2011, began its designing work in May 2011, and worked on the design of vehicle. The various vehicle subsystems, namely- suspension, transmission, wheel assembly, chassis, steering, electrical systems were designed using design calculations and Solidworks software and the design were analyzed using the software ANSYS.
The team participated in Virtual BAJA Competition held in Bangalore on 19th & 20th August 2011. 100 teams have been shortlisted and qualified out of the 244 teams registered for the competition. We got placed 37 th place out of 100 teams all over India.
