Jersey Tom
01-02-2007, 08:03 PM
While when designing our cars and spending many long days and nights building and testing seeking that overall win at Detroit (or wherever), Formula SAE is certainly at its core, geared as a learning experience. In order to design a potential winner of a car, the more you know about the fundamentals and nuances of motorsport engineering the better off you are.
As 'junior' automotive engineers we all have the same problem and goal - make our car go around the track in the shortest amount of time. With this, and a basic toolset of engineering and vehicle dynamics knowlwedge, we set out for our own creative solution. While we all take pride and ownership in our own specific applications, I think we could all benefit tremendously from collaborative knowledge transfer on the fundamental level. Hell even sharing stuff on application (chosen spring and damper rates) is nice now and then as a sanity check and to see what other people are doing.
The FSAE TTC is a great example of this, and by looking at the raw data, my own porting of Pacejka '96 to MATLAB and talking to some development engineers at Goodyear, my knowledge of tires and vehicle dynamics has gone up a couple orders of magnitude.
Another thing, which I think I've brought up before, is Colorado and Colorado State are planning on doing some collaborative research on tuning the Cane Creek DB-1 for a spec needed for a FSAE car. Will potentially involve changing overall damping rates, changing internals to adjust where the high speed transition occurs, that sort of thing. While we'll both have the same knowledge, our cars are very different (as are the team and management structures!!) and the application will probably be much different.
I think the Claude seminars are great, and I'll have to get out to one at some points, and I had the priviledge the other day of talking with John Caldwell about engine work (for the record he has 35 years engine building and tuning experience, 300 wins including LeMans 24hr, Daytona 24hr, Sebring 12hr, ALMS, Trans Am, IMSA GTP, FIA World Championships, SCCA Nationals, etc).
I'd be curious what the general vibe towards this is, and what people are interesting in learning. Personally I'm keen on..
<UL TYPE=SQUARE>
<LI>Developing correlations between steered and slip angles of FSAE tires at varying load for better Ackmerann analysis
<LI>Most influential factors on engine output power and band width (I vote exhaust much higher than intake)
<LI>How the hell to design camshafts
<LI>Effect of chassis as a torsion spring linking front and rear suspensions
<LI>Various effects of roll and pitch center position.. both static and migration. What is most important?
<LI>How important is heat retention in exhaust?
<LI>Exhaust flowrates.. 300 ft/s is a good rule of thumb, but is it better to be high or low? Is it most important in the primaries and not so much after collectors, or all around critical?
<LI>Best way to do transient flow analysis of an intake to determine if individual cylinders are starved for air or need significant trim in tuning
<LI>Different ways people have gone about damper rate selection
[/list]
Input? Anyone elses feelings on all this?
As 'junior' automotive engineers we all have the same problem and goal - make our car go around the track in the shortest amount of time. With this, and a basic toolset of engineering and vehicle dynamics knowlwedge, we set out for our own creative solution. While we all take pride and ownership in our own specific applications, I think we could all benefit tremendously from collaborative knowledge transfer on the fundamental level. Hell even sharing stuff on application (chosen spring and damper rates) is nice now and then as a sanity check and to see what other people are doing.
The FSAE TTC is a great example of this, and by looking at the raw data, my own porting of Pacejka '96 to MATLAB and talking to some development engineers at Goodyear, my knowledge of tires and vehicle dynamics has gone up a couple orders of magnitude.
Another thing, which I think I've brought up before, is Colorado and Colorado State are planning on doing some collaborative research on tuning the Cane Creek DB-1 for a spec needed for a FSAE car. Will potentially involve changing overall damping rates, changing internals to adjust where the high speed transition occurs, that sort of thing. While we'll both have the same knowledge, our cars are very different (as are the team and management structures!!) and the application will probably be much different.
I think the Claude seminars are great, and I'll have to get out to one at some points, and I had the priviledge the other day of talking with John Caldwell about engine work (for the record he has 35 years engine building and tuning experience, 300 wins including LeMans 24hr, Daytona 24hr, Sebring 12hr, ALMS, Trans Am, IMSA GTP, FIA World Championships, SCCA Nationals, etc).
I'd be curious what the general vibe towards this is, and what people are interesting in learning. Personally I'm keen on..
<UL TYPE=SQUARE>
<LI>Developing correlations between steered and slip angles of FSAE tires at varying load for better Ackmerann analysis
<LI>Most influential factors on engine output power and band width (I vote exhaust much higher than intake)
<LI>How the hell to design camshafts
<LI>Effect of chassis as a torsion spring linking front and rear suspensions
<LI>Various effects of roll and pitch center position.. both static and migration. What is most important?
<LI>How important is heat retention in exhaust?
<LI>Exhaust flowrates.. 300 ft/s is a good rule of thumb, but is it better to be high or low? Is it most important in the primaries and not so much after collectors, or all around critical?
<LI>Best way to do transient flow analysis of an intake to determine if individual cylinders are starved for air or need significant trim in tuning
<LI>Different ways people have gone about damper rate selection
[/list]
Input? Anyone elses feelings on all this?