ESTECO and Aprilia Racing awarded the winners of the ESTECO Academy Design Competition coming from the USA, the Czech Republic and Croatia.
The ESTECO Academy Design Competition, organized in collaboration with Aprilia Racing and Gamma Technologies, challenged engineering students from all over the world to test their skills in numerical analysis, simulation and testing while aiming to design the perfect race engine. Over 500 students from more than 30 countries had expressed their interest in participating, while 233 qualified by satisfying all the criteria. Finally, 13 qualified projects were presented from 12 universities in nine countries (Croatia, Czech Republic, Italy, India, Germany, Malta, Spain, UK and the USA). The challenge concluded with the Award Ceremony held last Friday at the Aprilia Racing HQs in Noale, Italy.
During their visit to the Aprilia laboratories, the winning teams had the occasion to watch the engineers at work on various assignments, from simulation to assembling, electronics, quality control and more.
Moreover, the winner will be able to take advantage of a 6-month internship at Aprilia Racing, while each member of the first and second-best team will also enjoy one year of free ESTECO Academy membership, including the ESTECO multidisciplinary optimization software, modeFRONTIER.
The winner, Michael Bambula (Kyle Beggs team) of the University of Florida, USA, presented a top-notch design project, managing to achieve significant performance improvements (64.2 hp @16500 rpm) while developing a complete model for a Moto3 bike and realistic simulations that also considered the specifics of the race track. The jury particularly appreciated the comprehensive approach and the rigorous methodology adopted by the team.
"ESTECO Academy Design Competition was a perfect exercise of a real-world engineering problem that is encountered every day in the Powertrain Industry. The collaboration between ESTECO and the sponsors was great", - said Michael Bambula, the winner of the challenge, who participated in the Award ceremony via video-link.
"Utilizing modeFRONTIERsaved literally weeks of manual design iteration and certainly helped me identify a better solution. Overall, the competition gave me the chance to enhance my
knowledge in engine simulation as well as optimization and apply them to an interesting and challenging situation". All the members of the two teams awarded the shared second prize were present in Noale: CTU Racing Team from the Prague, Czech Technical University, and FESB Racing team from the University of Split, Croatia. "We are truly impressed by the overall quality of the projects and by the variety of ideas presented. It is our honor to keep supporting the talented engineers of the future on their journey into the professional world through our ESTECO Academy program", said Enrico Nobile, Scientific Advisor at ESTECO. "The competition offers engineering students from all over the world the unique opportunity to apply leading professional technology to develop real-world solutions. Thanks to the partnership with Aprilia, the winner will get to experience the 'real world' of motorcycle engineering. Our special thanks go to Aprilia Racing, which will allow the winner to enjoy an internship experience in the field of motorcycle racing design".
The challenge consisted in the design of a 4 stroke single cylinder engine through multidisciplinary optimization, using modeFRONTIER and 1-D simulation of the engine system with GT-Suite, with the aim of determining the optimum engine performance while taking into account the restrictions and starting from a base configuration. The jury, composed of three experts (ESTECO, Aprilia Racing, Gamma Technologies) judged the projects based on the following criteria: creativity, innovation vs. traditional solutions, predicted performance, justified improvements, and applied methodologies.