Fancy a set of "J-Damper" for your F1 car, well now you can...

[RacingManiac]

Cambridge University Engineering Department: News item

Maybe Audi will buy it for their R15?

[MPME]

they know all about it

[drakkie]

How about Koni then ? thye play a part in it as well ? they supply dampers to McLaren for years now...

**runs of and calls uncle making these f1 parts**

[LotusLocost]

I wish I had an uncle..

[Homem de Gelo]

Are these the type of dampers ridiculously banned from Renault on 2006?

[RacingManiac]

no that was "mass damper" installed on the chassis, this was "Inerter", which essentially does the same thing, but was made to be part of the suspension, is completely passive, and thus considered as legal....

And yes I am sure Audi already know this, but now everyone knows about it as well, and can be bought off the shelf. Though I am not sure the implementation of it will be easy, since it is frequency dependent and from what I understand McLaren tunes it to suit the circuit surface and bump condition....

[digitalcraft]

Whomever wrote that article needs a bit of firing. I feel like they made it more confusing than it needed to be.

[RacingManiac]

Whomever wrote that article needs a bit of firing. I feel like they made it more confusing than it needed to be.

you should read the actual presentation....a hell of a lot more confusing....

http://www-control.eng.cam.ac.uk/~mcs/lecture_j.pdf

[Pitwork]

Can someone explain what this does in plain Engrish?

[RacingManiac]

not likely, as it is nothing plain about it....

Simplest form, if you have taken vibration, a suspension type spring/mass system can be represented by a electrical equivelent , replacing mass, spring and damper with capacitor, resistor and inductor. Most things corelates quite well, however there are no physical spring-mass equivelent of a capacitor in real world. In comes this "inerter"....

Physically, the forces in a suspension system are resulted by road input, which is transmitted through tire spring, into the suspension system, then to the suspension spring and damper. However, difference in forces resulted by the reaction of the tirespring to the road input and the forces generated by the suspension spring and damper combo cannot be controlled in a conventional spring/damper system, and that produces force variation at contact patch, making it hard to extract the maximum of the tire grip. The idea of the inerter is to control that force, thus extracting max grip.....since this is independent of your suspension(spring/damper wise) setup, you can thus in theory, runs a stiffly sprung car to get maximum control of tire grip and aero, and let the inerter deal with the uneveness of the bumpy condition....

[fpv_gtho]

The original Renault mass damper was also designed, in simple terms, to enable the car to be alot more stable over bumps and kerbs etc and thus provide a much more stable aerodynamic platform.

Would this achieve a similar feat?

[RacingManiac]

yes...as I mentioned, they essentially do the same thing, but since McLaren incorporated this in the suspension system, it was harder for someone to argue that it is a "active-aerodynamic-through-chassis-control" thing....This also explains why when the whole Mass Damper business came to light in 2006, which pretty much everybody tested a form of a cloned mass-damper system on their car, McLaren did not find it useful, as they themselves have been running the inerter since 2005 and have already achieved the same result...

[MPME]

The original Renault mass damper was also designed, in simple terms, to enable the car to be alot more stable over bumps and kerbs etc and thus provide a much more stable aerodynamic platform.

Would this achieve a similar feat?

Mass dampers have nothing to do with aero stability whatsoever. 3rd damper/springs do, however.

[Chernaudi]

But this does also beg the question of is the speed differenial between the R10 and the 908 due to the open vs closed car argument(for sure, the 908 was faster down the straights at Le Mans this year than the R10), or is it the J damper accounting for most of this?

[MPME]

But this does also beg the question of is the speed differenial between the R10 and the 908 due to the open vs closed car argument(for sure, the 908 was faster down the straights at Le Mans this year than the R10), or is it the J damper accounting for most of this?

Audi highlighted two areas where the 908 was superior prior to Le Mans this year--mechanical grip (where the J-Damper would help) and low drag bodywork.

At Le Mans, Peugeot brought out even slipperier (not a word) aero and a power upgrade. So, to keep score, the 908's accomplished the holy trinity of performance improvements--better handling, better aero, and more power.

The gained in fuel mpg from the better aero but lost that small gain and then some with the extra power.

Audi had minor improvements in all three areas, but less so on the mechanical grip side.