Side Projects
'Bee-R' ITU Formula SAE Car's Mechanical Design
ITU Formula SAE Team, which is Turkey's first Formula-SAE Team, was founded in 2006. Our target was to take the initiative to start Formula SAE in Turkey and produce a car for the 2007 Formula SAE Italy event. However, due to the difficulties of making the university's and also the country’s first Formula SAE car, the efforts failed to design a producible one. In October of the year 2007, remaining members of the team, mostly consisting of second year students and two M.Sc. students, started to work on a brand new design.
Due to our very small team and bureaucratic procedures, our work slowed. In the Spring of 2010 we, as ten students from different engineering branches, completed Turkey’s first and only Formula SAE Car. After four years of lasting faith and commitment to complete the project, we entered the Formula SAE Michigan 2010, event.
In this project, as we were only a few members, I (and also the other members) worked on almost the entire mechanical design. However, the chassis and suspension design were in my responsibility.
After attending Formula SAE 2010 - Michigan event, as the designers of the first car, we founded a completely new team for the design and production of a new F-SAE car for the future events. We also left the team leadership to a freshman student in order to establish a new team, but providing them with experience and knowledge. Although, we as the founding members are not in the team anymore, we all are trying to mentor the teams in fields where guidance is needed.
ITU Formula SAE Team is now designing its second car to compete in the Formula Student Germany. Formula SAE (or Formula Student in Europe, Formula ATA in Italy) is a student design competition organized by SAE. ITU Formula SAE Team is determined to produce a powerful car for the Formula-ATA, 2013 Event. More information about the ITU Formula SAE Team can be gathered from the team's web page.
Online estimation of driving resistance parameters
I took as a student researcher part in a research project between Dr.-Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG and KIT - Institute of Vehicle System Technology. The goal of this project was to estimate the unknown driving resistance parameters by the use of online filters.
My advisor in this project Ph.D. Stephan Rhode was researching online filters and performed test-runs to investigate the quality of the developed vehicle models. Acquired data from the vehicle CAN-Bus thereby allowed accurate range prediction and a better driving strategy selection
In this project, I provided assistance to my advisor in post-processing for roughly four months. Especially creating codes in MATLAB for various filter types, plotting figures which could serve for the ease of model selection, improving the visualization of figures, and literature review about the topic were my duties.
Gearbox and Coupling Design
As a mechanical engineer, I had to design some gearboxes, shafts, HVAC-systems etc. Interested readers can access the designs of some from the links below:
'HaydARI' Minisumo Robot Design
A sumo robot's task is to push the robot that it is competing with to outside of a circle. Mini-sumo robot is a category of the sumo robots. They can be up to 500 grams and 10 cm by 10 cm without any height limit. Sumo robot competitions are held worldwide with Japan being the pioneer. I had prepared a mini-sumo robot for METU Robotic Days in 2007. Because it was my first robot with which I took part in a competition, it has a special place for me.
To determine the position of the opponent robot, five Sharp 2D150A F IR sensors were used, with there of them looking forward. The neccessary algorithms were written on ANSI C and were implemented on a PIC16F628 microcontroller. To overcome the 10 cm x 10 cm restriction, the robot was designed to expand after the start by opening its front plate.