Cardiff University Engineering Students have been busy designing and building a single-seater racing car to enter into the “IMechE Formula Student” competition.

Over 2000 students nationwide compete in this exciting competition held each year at the Silverstone Race Circuit. Cars are put through their paces and tested to their limits to find the best overall package of acceleration, handling, design, reliability and economy.

The Cardiff Racing team took a tactical approach to the competition and opted to use lightweight composite materials for the construction of their racing car.

This allowed them to tick plenty of boxes – lightweight composites allow for acceleration and performance and increase fuel economy. Composites also provide a strong impact and vibration resistant structure for the vehicle. Unlike metal components, composite materials cannot be welded together so the team had to explore other methods of joining composite parts.

At this point, students contacted Permabond Engineering Adhesive Ltd’s technical team for help finding a suitable adhesive. Permabond has a range of composite bonding adhesives, including several new carbon fibre, colour-matched epoxies which are already being used for production of high performance cars and motorcycles in Europe.

For the students’ application, Permabond’s epoxy adhesive was used to bond aluminium inserts into carbon fibre tubes to construct the suspension links on the vehicle.

This was part of an exercise to minimise the overall mass of the car, in particular, the unsprung mass which allows the suspension to react faster to changes in direction, braking and bumps thus improving the overall handling characteristics of the vehicle. As well as this, the adhesive was used to construct drive shafts for the vehicle.

This was identified as an area where significant weight reduction could be made. As a rotating component, its mass reduction had a meaningful effect of the acceleration and braking of the vehicle.