Fabheads Sponsors Formula Bharat

We established Fabheads with a vision of nurturing innovation and supporting passion, to build an ecosystem in the technology industry. In that vein, we sponsored this season of Formula Bharat.

Formula Bharat is a premier Formula-style student racing event, where undergraduate students design and develop a Formula car to the competition's specifications. Formula Bharat 2019 brought together teams from engineering colleges across India, each arriving with a car they had designed and built themselves.

Why we sponsored it

We had a three-fold objective behind this sponsorship:

1. To give back to the community by sharing our knowledge with the next generation, and inspire more students to expand their horizons.
2. To increase awareness among the student community of better composite part fabrication processes, weight optimisation practices and other new technologies.
3. To open the possibility of offering internships and jobs to interested students.

Besides the commercial sponsorship, senior members of our team were present throughout the event and interacted with students from several colleges — sharing knowledge and insights, and offering suggestions they could incorporate into their present vehicle or their next one.

Design judges

From Fabheads, Dhinesh Kanagaraj (CEO and Founder) and Akshay Ballal (Head, Engineering) were invited to preside over the event as design judges. They could reliably be found after their judging, sharing insights and suggestions with students on how to improve, and motivating them to keep pushing further.

The Composite Tech Award

To add more to the initiative, we hosted a competition called the Composite Tech Award, to encourage students to understand the importance of composites and lightweight components.

Students from institutions across the country were asked to submit their own idea for incorporating composites into any component or mechanism of their choice.

More than 20 unique and innovative designs were submitted from 20 different teams. In a close competition, six teams were shortlisted for the final round, where their individual ideas and designs were demonstrated. Out of those six, Team Acceleracers was awarded the Composite Tech Award for their demonstration of a composite plenum.

As a token of appreciation, we offered the winning team a year of free design consultancy as an additional reward for their excellence in composite technology.

Learning sessions for students

The other addition we brought to the event was two one-hour sessions with our founder, Dhinesh Kanagaraj. The first was dedicated to lightweight designing, the second to composite part fabrication — considerations and tricks. Both were highly interactive, and students had the full hour to put questions directly to him.

His insights on lightweight design — and how the discipline is essentially derived from aviation — landed well with the students, who came away feeling they had been learning to design aerostructures rather than cars. The second session gave them several tricks used by in-trade technicians to get the best out of manual hand layup for their own cars, alongside the other processes available to them.

They were also given a glimpse of how our fiber printing technology could push their designs further — with a caution about the level of design skill required to take that route.

What we took away from it

Overall it was a great learning experience for the students and for us. Weight is the constraint that governs performance in a Formula car much as it does in an aerospace structure or an automotive component — which is why these conversations are worth having with engineers at the start of their careers rather than the middle of them.

We are glad to associate with young minds, and we signed off with a renewed hope for creating a better future.

Working on a student project where weight is the limiting factor? Get in touch with our team.