Occupational therapy
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last couple of months, it’s pretty obvious that Covid-19 has brought the world to a shattering halt. However, just because you are stuck at home doesn’t mean your race and performance engineering has to stop. Quite the contrary; this is a heaven-sent opportunity to do some analysis work that you usually don’t have time to do.
In this article I’m going to show you how to combine data analysis and simulation to fill in the blanks on two grey areas of vehicle dynamics; tyres and aerodynamics.
With regard to tyres, the first technique I’m going to show you is one I developed about four years ago that has since been widely adopted by the ChassisSim community. This technique revolves around the second order traction circle radius vs normal load fit, as presented in Equation 1. Some typical values for this are presented in Table 1.
Plot this out and you will have something that looks like Figure 1.
Where things with respect to load and set it to zero we get where is the load where the maximum value of the traction circle radius will occur. Doing a little bit more manipulation of and , the maximum possible value of the traction circle radius is shown in .
