DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS: ANTI-ROLL BAR

My group was tasked to design an experiment to analyze factors that could affect a product's performance. We chose our FSAE team's anti-roll bar as we were all familiar and comfortable with its design. We selected three continuous factors each with four levels: lever arm length, length of anti-roll bar, and cross sectional area. Then, we had material as a categorical factor with two levels. The main responses we chose to analyze were the anti-roll bar's torsional rigidity and factor of safety. Then, we varied the factors independently and dependently using SolidWorks modeling tools. Simulations were ran to see results of each factors at each level. These results were put into a spreadsheet to calculate torsional rigidity and then imported into DesignExpert to analyze the data using analysis of variance (ANOVA). We concluded that material and cross-sectional area affect the overall performance while the lever arm length only contributed to factor of safety.