I recently met with an organization that has developed load sensors that will actively measure and provide the load data applied to the four corners of your car as a result of cornering and braking etc. My question is, is this something you feel would be of interest when acquiring vehicle data? The four sensors would cost about $1000.
The technology to do corner loads on-board is nothing new really. It is an option on our Systems. Price varies depending on car type, but a pushrod car is easiest to do. FWIW, doing just the corner loads is pretty worthless, you need to be logging a bunch other paramaters as well to correlate the data.
CDS, I am curious as to how you measure the loads. Is it with strain gauges mounted on the push rods or some kind of load cell. It is my understanding that the standard approach (as you correctly say, done for years now) is to mount a full wheatstone bridge directly on the push rods with strain gauge amplifiers and current source near by.
A few related questions. What other sensors do you recommend to enhance the utility of these measurements. Shock potentiometers and pressure sensors? Are you doing this to measure aero forces or for suspension tuning? How fast does the data need to be acquired (data acquisition rate) for force measurements versus velocity or position data and is this really useful for damper development or not. When you refer to correlating the force data, to what?
Rick, a book could be written to fully answer all your questions.
You are correct in that to properly measure loads you need to strain gauge the push rods. At a minimum you should also measure suspension travel at all 4 corners, sway bar loads (with strain gauges), speed, 3 axis of G, and of course lap time/track position. I have probalby left something out too!
Don't forget to purchase a couple of engineers to interpret all the data!
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