Literature Review

1. Gillespie, Thomas; Fundamentals of Vehicle Dynamics

This textbook used in many of our classes is an excellent source. From understanding
load and stress analysis to failure resulting from loading, the book gives us all the tools necessary
to design our vehicle. The Mini-Baja vehicle is a project that is started from scratch and thus all
the different components must be analyzed and computed. This textbook gives us many of the
formulas and techniques we need to construct our vehicle

2. Dempsey, P.K., 1994, How to Repair Briggs and Stratton Engines,

McGraw-Hill Professional.
The book How to Repair Briggs and Stratton Engines is one of the top five sources of the 20
sources we found as a group. This source is important to the success of our project because it will
help us perform better with the Briggs & Stratton engine which is to be used in this SAE
competition. It will give us an advantage both when working on putting the engine together with
the car and once we are at the competition if some repair needs to be done to the engine, we have
the manual. The topics covered in the book are as follows: Introduction Safety Considerations,
The Product Range, Troubleshooting, Ignition Systems, The Fuel System, Starters, Charging
Systems, and Engine Mechanics. With this in our hands our knowledge of the engine will be at
its best.

3. Smith, Carroll; Tune to win

The team thinks that this particular component to the integrity and reliability of the car are
extremely important, not only to the design portion of this system, but also to the proper
selection of the adequate components to make this system. Even though there are many aspects
for designing a suspension, only those aspects that relate directly to the scope of this project will
be considered and thus further investigation about such components must be performed. Since
the team has a time constraint issue due to the amount of time there is before the competition, we
as a team are trying to identify those aspects of the design that are of the utmost importance so
that the proper time management can be allocated to this components
4. Petroski, H., 2006, Success Through Failure, Princeton University Press.
Success Through Failure shows us that making something better by anticipating failure is what
invention and design are all about. This book shows that all designs have some form of failure.
The Mini-Baja has many different design choices. Understanding that a good design is one that
has failed several times, we can build a better vehicle than our former team. This book gives us
the confidence to build and design a Mini-Baja vehicle with the understanding that failure is part
of the process.

5. Milliken & Milliken; Race car vehicle dynamics

The Science of Motor Vehicle Design textbook is a great source because it contains all of
the engineering used in the process of designing a car. It combines the sciences required and the
actual parts of a car. For example, in Chapter 2, it explains forces and moments, and then in the
last section it describes the design of framework with regards to the forces studied in the
previous section. Its content includes everything from distortion of materials, motion, power,
work, thermodynamics, metals, electricity, and control and instrumentation. Since we will be
designing and assembling the Mini-Baja car from scratch, this book will be a great guide for us.

6. B. Heissing, M. Ersoy; Chassis Handbook

7. Reimpell, Stoll & Betzler; The Automotive Chassis Engineering
Principles
8. Richard Stone and Jeffrey K. Ball; Automotive Engineering Fundamentals
9. Milliken & Milliken; Race car vehicle dynamics
10. Lechner Gisbert, Naunheimer Harald; Automotive Transmissions