OK, the picture above is the central gubbins of the modal isolation suspension system. You have a central block which carries a normal coil spring on one side and a coil-over unit on the other. For the purposes of mock-up, I've modelled a Sachs Race Engineering damper, although at the eye-watering costs of these units, I can't imagine I'd ever actually use one. This central unit slides left-to-right on linear bearings (You could probably get away with plain bushes, but I'd want as little stiction in my suspension linkages as I can get away with, hence the posh guide bearings) when the car rolls. The big bearings at the bottom of the picture are to support a bell-crank that will rotate around the lower guide rail to give displacement control in bump. At the moment these are standard roller bearings, although it'll make more sense for them to be tapered to allow for the axial loads as the roll displacement works.
The only outstanding issue is to work out the sort of springs rates needed for this unit and to find someone prepared to do a 1:1 bump:rebound damper. Because of the mounting angle, we need a mono-shock damper and it's pretty rare to get a 1:1 ration for rebound forces as you normally want softer bump (which controls the wheel mass relative to the body) than rebound (which controls the body relative to the wheel mass). If it proves to be completely unfeasable (unlikely), there's nothing stopping you using two coil-over units mounted back to back across the central bar.
Update
I've put the bellcrank (I haven't put the bolt holes for location the two pull/push rods yet) in position with a second coil-over unit to show the heave spring mechanism as well. I was originally planning to attach the heave unit to the body directly and put some sort of guide bush in to deal with the side-to-side movement, but it seems possible to locate it onto the same central bracket that holds the roll coil-over. The only issue is that you want the guide rails then to be as short as possible to manage the bending loads they'll be undergoing as a result. If the loading all looks a little severe then I can still attach the heave coil-over to the body, I'll just have to tweak the mountings so there's sufficient articulation in the bushes.
Time to hit the calculator and work out if the attractive looking method will work...
Sunday, 12 August 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment