optimusprime
Active Member
K`Tetch said:You've got your static and dynamic friction, your equations of motion and all the rest to play with.
That's pretty much all of Uni mechanics right there.
K`Tetch said:You've got your static and dynamic friction, your equations of motion and all the rest to play with.
That's pretty much all of Uni mechanics right there.
It is so sad that, in the US, that is the case.
Ah, now the active diffs. Yes, there's one of these in the middle of the car and another one on the back axle. The middle one controls what proportion of the torques from the engine go to the back wheels and what proportion go to the fronts. And the diff at the back does the same, splitting the torques between the rear wheels. They're both controlled by a very clever computer that has a speed sensor, a steering angle sensor and something called a 'yaw sensor' which sort of measures the line that the car is taking through a corner. This is very important. If the computer looks at your steering angle and then the yaw sensor tells it the car is turning through the corner less sharply than it should be for that amount of steering lock it thinks, 'uh-oh, that's understeer'. Then it telegraphs the centre differential and tells it to make sure more torques are going to the back axle so that the front stops dragging the car wide, like a front wheel drive car would. But then, as the car leaves the corner it tells the centre diff to push more torques forward to pull the car out of the turn without oversteering like a rear wheel drive car would. Hmm, yes, that sounds about right. Ah, and the active rear diff helps you out in sudden changes of direction so that if the car is looking like it might spin, the computer can step in and push torques to one wheel to push the rear of the car back on line. And all this computer thinking and moving of torques can happen in milliseconds. It's very clever. It's also made my brain hurt."