In a recent copy of F1 Racing magazine, Mike Gascoyne (techincal director of the Toyota F1 team) is quoted as saying "trackside acoustic analasis shows that we still have one of the most powerfull engines in F1"
How can they do that? I presume it's some sort of microphone wired up to a laptop, I can understand them being able to find out how high an engine is reving to from this but how can they mesure peak power?
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Relatively easy, if you know the revs & rate of rise of them plus the weight of the car, HP can be mathmematically calculated. Their is a dyno package available in software that does this using a feed from the coil to get RPM, this can be done by an audio link. Try members.fortunecity.com/jasoncuadra/id47.htm and others.
Jim
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Relatively easy, if you know the revs & rate of rise of them plus the weight of the car, HP can be mathmematically calculated.
To calculate using the revs and rate if rise of revs would you not need to know the exact overall gear ratio?
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The revs and their rate change can be measured accoustically.
Whilst the car stays in one gear then this is directly proportional to speed.
and as the mass is known, then Force=Mass * Acceleration
So the power can be calculated
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I read often, only post occasionally
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The revs and their rate change can be measured accoustically. Whilst the car stays in one gear then this is directly proportional to speed. and as the mass is known, then Force=Mass * Acceleration So the power can be calculated -- I read often, only post occasionally
So you would be required to know the speed as well?
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If the opponents car was video'd as well as sound recorded then distance travelled and/or speed could be worked out by watching it pass something like armco mounting posts. These could be measured accurately before or after an event. Count 'pop's per post and you could determine gear ratios.
I guess more could be estimated from sound recording as well - the equivalent of cam timing??
Don't forget these guys have huge quantities of cash available and amazingly powerful computer systems at their disposal.
Martin
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That's pretty interesting - but wouldn't the amount of downforce being generated make a difference?
More downforce == more weight = reduced acceleration/more grip
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Lee
MINI adventure in progress
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I haven't given this a huge amount of thought, but,...
As most aspects of the cars are tightly controlled by the F1 regs, i.e., all the cars are extremely similar, I would be surprised if the most powerful engine was not simply the one which revved the highest before changing gear.
So, all the acoustic software has to do is to pick of the maximum dominant frequency.
number_cruncher
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I also haven't given it any thought but I believe the rev counters you see in F1 and motoGP coverage are done based on the engine sound.
Certainly with formula 1 because of the regulations with fixed capacity, number of cylinders and V piston arrangement the main thing the teams can do to increase power output is to increase the maximum rpm - hence the rise in recent seasons to engines which peak at 18-19k rpm.
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