Shock Dynos

[Ben Beacock]

Has anyone built their own shock dyno?

Seems as though a large motor(ideally able to hold constant velocities) could drive a rotating plate with mounts at various diameters. Then a strain gauge and rpm sensor could give you force vs velocity?

Is it more complicated than that?

Ben Beacock
Co-Manager
2004 Gryphon Racing - University of Guelph (http://www.soe.uoguelph.ca/uogracing)

[Ben Beacock]

Has anyone built their own shock dyno?

Seems as though a large motor(ideally able to hold constant velocities) could drive a rotating plate with mounts at various diameters. Then a strain gauge and rpm sensor could give you force vs velocity?

Is it more complicated than that?

Ben Beacock
Co-Manager
2004 Gryphon Racing - University of Guelph (http://www.soe.uoguelph.ca/uogracing)

[Travis Garrison]

Ben, I'm sure it can be taken a great deal further than that, but we have done what you describe before, and are in the process of doing it again...

We are stealing a load cell from our materials lab, building a cam for our largest lathe, and a tower to mount the shock to the bed of our lathe...pretty simple to make, getting it to work well will, I'm sure, be another story.

...all we're really hoping for are ball park figures and hopefully the ability to match shock components. I'm sure if you have some good electronics folks you could make a pretty decent one on a lathe.
Travis Garrison
WWU FSAE

[1975BMW2002]

Wouldn't that loading be bad for the lathe? I think that our shop manager would string me up by my toes for doing some thing like this. i guess at low speeds the forces would be low, However, at higher speeds, which might be more realistic, it sounds like a way to mess up a bearing.

Bill-University of Maryland College Park

[Big Daddy]

What is the difference in that loading compared to an interuped cut like turning a square peice round. Probably not enough to matter.

"A woman is a lot like a beer, they look good, smell good, and you would run over your own mother to get one." Homer Simpson

Nobody is born with a steering wheel or a gear shift in his hand. It's something you choose to do or you don't.
Mario Andretti (1977)

[Travis Garrison]

Probably not the best for the equipment...but we're talking about a lathe built out of a metric S*** ton of steel...Very solid bed and we're not going to mount to the carriage, rather directly to the bed of the lathe.

Travis Garrison

[Joseph]

We considered building our own Shock tester. Instead we just used an MTS (Material testing system) machine. It already has a calibrated load cell and you can define the velocity. We just set it to a sine wave and let it do all the work. Opened the output file in excel and we were done.

Joseph

[Ben Beacock]

Yeah, we have a couple of those but I was very disappointed when I found out they only apply forces at very slow speeds (the ones we have anyways)

Ben Beacock
Co-Manager
2004 Gryphon Racing - University of Guelph (http://www.soe.uoguelph.ca/uogracing)