Nissan funds new parts for engineering's 2020 Baja all-terrain vehicle
Longtime partner Nissan donated $2,000 plus parts for senior design project.
Janel Shoun-Smith | 615.966.7078 |
The 2020 Lipscomb Motorsports team benefited from a donation from Nissan North America, covering all the parts needed for a new design for the competitive all-terrain vehicle.
This spring, Nissan North America, based in Smyrna, Tennessee, has donated $2,000, plus fulfilled a “Christmas Wish List” for needed parts, to build the Raymond B. Jones College of Engineering’s 2020 all-terrain vehicle to compete in the annual Baja SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) competition.
The ATV is an annual design project that 10 to 15 engineering students, the Lipscomb Mototrsports team, work to build throughout the year and then compete in a national dirt race in the spring.
This year’s event will be held in a soon-to-be-announced virtual fashion, but the team of students is still working on the design of the ATV, which will have new tubing, steel panels, aluminum, screws and more, donated by Nissan and shipped from sources all over the globe.
“We asked them for anything they can do, and they covered it all,” said Trey Hickey, engineering senior and project manager for the Baja vehicle. “It was better than Christmas morning.”
The Lipscomb Motorsports team is made up of 10 to 15 students who build an all-terrain vehicle each year to compete in the Baja SAE national competition.
Hickey and fellow Baja team member Hunter Haynes, both senior mechanical engineering majors, interned for Nissan’s Maintenance Supervisor of Body Fabrication and Engineering Wayne Ellington and his colleagues in Smyrna for two summers and both have accepted job offers at Nissan after graduation in May.
Nissan engineers are also acting as consultants for the Baja design, reviewing Finite Element Analysis (FEA) schematics, Hickey said.
Nissan has been a long-time friend of Lipscomb Engineering, providing more than $718,000 since 2010 to fund the summer Lipscomb/Nissan BisonBot Robotics Camps and the annual Music City BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology) competition held in the fall.
The Lipscomb Motorsports team has to raise about $15,000 each year to compete in the Baja SEA competition. The team carried out a Crowdfunding campaign, what we call Herdfunding on campus, to raise the additional needed funds for 2020.
This year re-designing the suspension system for the ATV served as a senior design project for several mechanical engineering students.
With the recent pandemic forcing the spring Baja SAE to become a virtual event, the Lipscomb Motorsports team plans to use the extra time to plan ahead, said Samuel Wright, engineering laboratory manager.
The team will build-out the current design and race it at Midnight Mayhem in the fall, an all-night endurance test for the vehicles held in Louisville, Kentucky, and at the 2021 Baja SAE in the spring, allowing students to begin work on the 2022 vehicle a semester ahead of schedule, he said.
Members of the Lipscomb Motorsports team are: Ryan Harness, team captain; Hickey, project manager; senior design team for the suspension system, Jase George, Haynes, Isaac Vaught, Trey Hickey, Scott Johnston, Kevin Tobin and Harness; and other team members, Trent Nichols, Amy Hollowell and Paxton Powell.