Legal active suspension - sorta

[joseff]

Hi everyone,

I've been having this idea in my head for quite some time. The main benefit of Williams' active suspension was that it keeps the attitude of the car stable esp. during acceleration & braking.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I saw a feature on TechTV about a Head snowboard with electronic-controlled "active" fibers in it. The idea was that small amounts of electric current could alter the stiffness of the fibers, making the board stiffer when turning and softer in a straight line.

Can this be applied to tires as well? ie. altering the sidewalls' stiffness so that the tires maintain their shape regardless of load. This would produce an effect similar to the active suspension of the 90's.

Or you can implant extra sensors (rate of change in rotation, temperature, pressure, deformation) in the tires and make them 'smarter'. This way you can even implement additional control strategies. For example, making the tires flatter during starts; or control the sidewalls independently so that it's possible to manipulate the shape of the contact patches individually.

I think this would be legal - or hard to detect that it's almost legal *wink*

[Mini Bernie]

well it's a nice idea,
but the regulations only allow for electronics of any sort to be included in the drive train systems, since last year,
that's why all the teams had to downgrade their power steering systems from electronic to hydraulic.
hence it's illegal by default.

on a side note, I've no idea what kind of power requirments these tires would need, but it would probably be quite high considering the forces involved, which would simply take power away from the engine or add extra weight for bateries.

and changing tires at pitstops would be an interesting procedure....

Oh well yet another idea that could have been developed in F1 and made road cars fast and safer, but will now have to wait years before it is noticed by a company with a big enough research budget. never mind.

[Monstrobolaxa]

Well....the least I can say is: interesting!

But like Mini Bernie said....the regs say NO!....but anyway it could be an interesting idea for the Paris-Dakar! They already have inflating and deflating devices on the tires....so some kind of system like this one...might be do-able.

But.....(there is always a but)....the weight of the tire would probably be increased....(cause of the amount of sensores and tensores installed)....the wiring....the control module....the batteries....for F1...I don't think it would be appropriate....but for truck racing it is an interesting sight....but the second BUT.....the COST!!!!

[joseff]

Erm I don't remember about batteries, but if the whole thing is compact enough to fit on snowboards...

Funny thing, I don't see anything about it on Head's website. IIRC it's the Head Freeride snowboard, if any of you here have one.

It's not an actuator to change the shape of the board, but rather change the stiffness (and hence natural freq) of the board. So, in F1 cars where tires contribute up to 50% of suspension travel, even small changes in sidewall stiffnes (= spring constant, tire pressure, contact patch shape, etc) would have huge benefits. It could compensate for cold tires, tire wear, cold dampers etc.

Which brings us to another interesting idea: preheated dampers. I read a book by Paul Van Valkenburgh long ago (can't remember the title) that cold dampers also present handling problems esp. in IndyCars (now CART). But I digress...

Yeah I guess the tires are illegal. But if it's small enough to fit on a snowboard...