Meet the TU Graz Racing Team!
TU Graz Racing Team competes in the formula student worldwide competition, gathering 700 engineering teams. It’s working with pretty tough regulations close to Formula 1 requirements.
Because of the international participation and the common mix-ups with Australia abroad, they named the series TANKIA for “there are no kangaroo in Austria!”. For their new car ‘s name in 2020, they chose Gloria and it was a completely new development.
Indeed, instead of the KTM engine, the drivetrain consists of two electric wheel hub motors with planetary gearbox on the rear axle.
Then, they finally switched to the electric class of the Formula Student, with the goal of following up on the successes of the combustion era.
In 2020, they finished to build Gloria making it running with 280 kms despite of the sanitary crisis.
This year, they’re going a step further, with a new PU-concept, a new accumulator, inverter and a lot of aerodynamic updates, proudly continuing their 3-year plan car development.
Luka belongs to the team and is head of chassis and aerodynamics, helping them with issues and giving them advice. Naturally, since the chassis and aerodynamics department contains the major share of carbon fiber parts, it has the greatest need to optimize the use of materials by nesting.
In the past, they were struggling with other nesting software, but finally they found Nest&Cut ! A web-based nesting application made by Alma Group.
Indeed, everything on a race car is designed in the CAD software and then it goes to manufacturing where they really need to be efficient in optimizing the layup of each part.
This is understandable when you know the process requires thousands of sheets, different layers and some files have up to 80 different plies!
They have a lot of cut parts on the car, which require different modules working with a nesting software and managing different machines such as waterjet, laser or knife cutting.
How does Nest&Cut help the TU Graz team in their daily work?
The process is always the same: TU Graz racing team starts by exporting the plies from the ply-book to a DXF file and then to Nest&Cut. With the Nest&Cut drag and drop system it’s really easy to upload it and then nest it.
What the TU Graz Racing Team enjoys the most in Nest&Cut is the capability of nesting different layers in the DXF file, without losing the reference and positioning. This is used to label each ply with its reference number, making sure everyone working on the part knows exactly how to place the ply properly.
This ensures also accurate manufacturing to be as close as possible to the layup used in the FEM-simulation. This is particularly important in the production of the monocoque, as up to 500 plies need to be laid accurately.
Before Nest&Cut this process had to be done by a few people looking at the CAD data all to time to ensure the correct position, which has cost a lot of time.
For Luka, Nest&Cut is intuitive, easy to handle, self-explanatory, with practical features such as “drag and drop” and no complicated symbols.
Also, the DXF files coming from the CAD system are often not very clean and the team used to have to correct them manually. Thanks to Nest&Cut, the files can be automatically cleaned on upload so once again they save a lot of working time.
From the production teams point of view, a group of 20 people directly involved in the cutting process, Nest&Cut and the associated workshop sheet allows them to optimize the production.