Does anyone know of any good technical books on designing tubular chassis? Preferably involving all the dynamics and going in depth on suspension design.
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Does anyone know of any good technical books on designing tubular chassis? Preferably involving all the dynamics and going in depth on suspension design.
Don't know any that cover the whole area but the Carrol Smith Design to Win, Engineer to Win and Built to Win books can't hurt.
If you want to start of easy, the Locost bible is a good book...
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The readers by our teachers should wrok good too :) In dutch though...
it may be clear already, but those are two very different subjects.
A spaceframe is extremly simple; the ultimate goal is to have each member experience only compressive or tensile(ideal) loads. The strict definition of a [U]space[/U]frame is that any member could be replaced by a cable. I designed the chassis of my schools FSAE car and the most valuable tool was FEA. During the design I went through about 30 which could all be compared empirically.
Look for books on Statics, Weld properties (ASM Handbook, but not all 1300 pages!), Material selection, etc.
Vehicle dynamics are for the most part independant of the type of chassis as long as you know its torsional stiffness etc. Look for books by Adams, Smith, Mitchell(?)
is this for a real project or just learning?
Its both a project and I want to learn. I'm going into Mechanical and Automotive Engineering as soon as I graduate high school and my project one is going to be build my own track day car, not because theres a track within 200km of me but just so I've done it and have hands on experience as that always helps me learn something. I know it may sound stupid and cliche, especially on UCP but I want to know how to engineer a full on race car from the ground up. I want to design it, I want to build it and ultimately I want to race it.
[URL="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1859606369/ref=wl_it_dp/026-0419486-4842856?ie=UTF8&coliid=I2JTYLRXP3QODD&colid=3M53LU7X38P47"]Ron Champions Locost[/URL] book is quite good, but watch out for some errors in the measurements he gives (Google Mcsorley for some corrected and updated chassis plans).
When I designed a spaceframe chassis for my uni project I found it best to look at as many other designs as I could to get an idea of how best to do things. One book I found very useful was [URL="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0760302839/ref=wl_it_dp/026-0419486-4842856?ie=UTF8&coliid=IX6DS7DR41QKR&colid=3M53LU7X38P47"]Racecar chassis design & construction[/URL]; it critiques many racing spaceframes and points out the does and don't. Things like mounting suspension arms in double shear and not having brackets mounted half-way along a tube.
The chassis isn't the first thing you should be designing, once you have the mounting points for the suspension, engine, driver etc the chassis can be designed around them.
[URL="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Race-Vehicle-Dynamics-William-Milliken/dp/1560915269/sr=1-2/qid=1164362196/ref=sr_1_2/026-0419486-4842856?ie=UTF8&s=books"]Millikens RaceCar Vehicle Dynamics[/URL] is considered the bible on suspension design, but is very theoretical. Well worth a read and you'll probably come across it on your course anyway. For something more practical Allan Staniforth has a couple of books which are useful. I hear the Carroll Smith books are good but I've not seen them being this side of the pond :)
If you want some inspiration then check out [URL="http://www.locostbuilders.co.uk"]locostbuilders.co.uk[/URL]