When students from universities all over Europe arrive in Varano de' Melegari in Italy to race their newly-designed Formula-style cars in the Formula SAE student competition, Israel will be right there with them.
This will be the second year in which Israel will participate in this much-anticipated competition, but it will be the first year that BGU has partnered with Bezalel’s Department of Industrial Design for this prestigious event. BGU is in charge of the engineering side of the project while Bezalel is responsible for the style and design.
Formula SAE is a testing ground for the next generation of world-class engineers and designers. It challenges teams of university students from around the world to design and build a single-seat racing car, which is then put to the test on race tracks in different parts of the globe. The Formula SAE Italy will take place at the "Riccardo Paletti" Circuit in Varano de' Melegari (PR) from Friday September 14 to Monday September 17 2012.
Bezalel’s Department of Industrial Design developed a car design course especially for this project. The course and design project were the initiative of Bezalel’s Dori Regev, a senior lecturer in the department, and was met with delight by BGU. The engineering process was handled by students from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at BGU, and the design was developed through the course at Bezalel. The meetings throughout the year included lecturers visiting Bezalel from BGU and vice versa.
“The project presented the unique opportunity to bring together developers from these two complimentary disciplines, which allowed them to conduct a mutually-enriching and real development process, with a front-line view of creating a real automotive product,” says Regev.
“The course's aim is to simulate a realistic design process, where overlapping disciplines such as aerodynamics and styling can be discussed and concepts can evolve through a mutual process. The students researched the stylistic language of race cars, the historical perspective and the contemporary relevance.
“Each student practiced concept development and presented styling proposals. A selected (single) concept evolved into the production of a working race car as a group effort. The results prove that it has been an enormous success,” he says.
“’Formula SAE’ is a student-design competition, designed to bring academic knowledge to an applied project, and one with industry expectations,” says BGU team leader, Ben Levitan. “The annual competition features academic institutions designing a vehicle that must meet given specifications, and presenting it for a competitive score. The vehicle must meet the criteria of performance, engineering excellence, innovation, and general appearance. SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) International, which founded the competition, is the major and most important group of automotive engineers in the world.
“As the project progressed, there was a coordinated team effort to synthesize the original ideas into a more integrated concept for prototype production,” says Levitan. “The prototype was developed in conjunction with engineering design advances, which we implemented in our engineering program. We believe we have created a race car that will be able to compete with the best Formula SAE teams around the world and we look forward to showing our race car in Italy this month.”
The BGU/Bezalel Formula SAE race car project could not have happened without the support of its sponsors. They include: Logi-X and The Run-Up Group; UPS; Objet; Pilco Engineering; ITS Engineering; Michael and Joan Rahav and many more supporters of this innovative project.
Last year, the BGU team did incredibly well in its debut performance. The BGU team was the best of the new teams and came in 15th overall out of 57 teams. This year, in conjunction with Bezalel, the team is hoping to improve even more.
