Hello, and welcome to our first KTH Formula Student newsletter!
We are Filip Söderberg and Axel Hällefors, the team captains of KTH Formula Student, and we’re excited to start this monthly newsletter. Our goal is to give our sponsors and supporters like you a behind-the-scenes look at our progress and the latest happenings within our team.
The season of 2023-2024 has been a standout season for us so far. Our recruitment was a big success, bringing many new talented members on board. We’ve introduced regular work sessions where team members collaborate on various projects, and these have been instrumental in helping everyone integrate quickly and effectively. Now, our team has grown to 93 students from 12 different KTH programs and 14 countries. An added bonus has been our team dinners after weekly meetings, which everyone seems to really enjoy.
For this season, we’ve divided our timeline into two main parts: design in the fall and manufacturing in the spring. We’ve made good progress in the design phase, meeting our initial concept design deadlines. Now, we’re pushing hard towards our final design deadline on December 18th. We’ve put considerable effort into improving our documentation, workflow, and team structure, and we’re seeing the positive impacts of these changes already. For instance, our improved wiki is a great resource, especially for our new members.
After the competitions this summer, we’ve kept the momentum going with several thorough testing sessions. Each of these sessions is focused and followed by detailed documentation and safety checks.
This approach has been incredibly helpful in understanding how our car works and what we can do to make it better. That being said, we are quite proud of how well it already performs. We’re also excited to share that we’ve successfully tested a 4WD system for the first time in our team’s history! It’s a big step forward and a real boost for the whole team.
Even though we are in our design phase, naturally, there are many things still needed to be done outside of design specifically. For example, XShore helped us with space, technical assistance and materials, to make sure we could cure our testing panels. The panels are needed to prove to the judges at competition that our monocoque has the equivalent required properties.
We had the pleasure of testing nine different laminates of carbon fibre at Scania, one of our partners. The purpose of said testing was to optimise our future chassis with regards for example both stiffness and weight. In addition, Scania also lent us their test track, and it was actually at this track we completed our first 4WD test! Finally, we had our yearly event with Scania, called “Scania Partnership Day”, and as always, it was very rewarding for our many members (see pictured image below). We were given lunch and various tours of certain areas of interest at their facilities in Södertälje. Additionally, another partner of ours, Essiq, held an excellent afterwork, where we got together with their office in Solna to have a great time.
A heartfelt thank you for your continued support of our team! With your encouragement and assistance, we’re turning challenges into triumphs and dreams into reality. Your generosity not only fuels our project but also brightens our educational journey. Here’s to more adventures and successes together!
Until next time,
Filip and Axel