22+ BRZ Baffle Plate Concept
See my design process as I learned the sheet-metal UI in SolidWorks to develop my own concept for an oil pan baffle plate for the newest generation of BRZ and GR86 that should mitigate their notorious oil pressure drops during high G right-hand cornering.
Ideation
Given the two-week time crunch of the assignment, I immediately got to ideating and sketching. I traced and noted the silhouette dimensions from pre-existing baffle plates, and from there, I sketched a plethora of different designs which I thought would best funnel/center oil into the pickup and prevent it from sloshing around and away to starve the engine. From there, I circled some of the designs I believed would work the best, and moved on to modeling.
Modeling
I then took the project into SolidWorks. Starting with a metal sheet base, I made cuts for the oil pickup to fit through, holes for attachment into the oil pan, and holes for oil to flow/funnel through to get to the pickup. I also used the flange tool to create a fixed trap door to drop oil right into the oil pickup as it comes down.
FINAL PRODUCT
The Trap Doors
After that, I designed rubber trap doors that would seat themselves on the underside of the baffle plate, so that as oil hits the top of the pan, it flows through these trap doors, funneling to the pickup, and then can no longer go back up the way it came, and seated them into the plate in an assembly file.
And this is the final concept put together and rendered in KeyShot. In the future, I plan to run SolidWorks fluid simulations on this prototype to see how efficiently oil will flow through it before making modifications to the design.