[Engineering Feature]
The Indianapolis 500 Electronic Edge
IndyCar Series race cars all must use the same engine and semi-automatic transmission, so teams look to electronics and telemetry to give them the extra advantage needed for a trip to victory lane.
The choice hinges on a range of factors, such as the tire characteristics; track characteristics, including details like temperature; and the data available from the car via telemetry. The experience of the team is, no doubt, also crucial.
In addition, it’s possible to detect a leak in a tire by watching its pressure. Detecting a leak early allows a car to return to the pit early for a quick replacement before the tire goes flat. Another area of adjustment is the cooling system. If the car and engine are running too cold or hot, then changes need to be made the next time the car comes into the pits.
Other members of the crew will often take a quick look at the readings in addition to the full-time tech crew. The telemetry information is distributed by a localarea network (LAN), so it’s easy to add more workstations to the mix.
Ron Ruzewski notes that teams with multiple cars, such as Penske, will normally have a dedicated crew for each car while using a common network. This makes it possible for one crew to view the information about the other car, which can be handy for seeing how track conditions are affecting the other vehicles.
BUILD YOUR OWN SENSORS Many sensors are already built into the system, such as the ECU. Much of this information is available via the controllerarea network (CAN) bus that’s already used to link automotive control and monitoring systems. Likewise, sensors are built into components throughout the car, such as tire pressure and temperature sensors. These sensors are now making their way into consumer automotive products, too.
Teams can add more sensors to complement those already built into the car. Many of these devices are off-the-shelf sensors with standard interfaces such as serial or CAN. For others, more custom work is involved.
Teams occasionally design and build their own sensors (Fig. 5). This involves a custom circuit board using off-the-shelf sensors from distributors like Digi-Key. They’re easily hooked into the telemetry system using microcontrollers. Schaechter indicated that the increased availability of sophisticated low-cost sensors with digital interfaces has greatly simplified the job of creating these modules. In fact, modules are often created in-house now instead of being farmed out to a consulting firm.
These custom modules must be ruggedized to handle race conditions. Some are used only during practice, while others may be used during a race. They can be used for diagnostics to help isolate problems as well.
SAFETY FIRST, DATA SECOND Keeping the driver safe is paramount, which sometimes means reducing the performance of the cars across the board. It’s why engines have been scaled down over the years—increased efficiency has led to higher-performance engines. Still, there are occasional fender benders and major crashes. This is where the little IRL black box comes into play.
Similar to the black box on airplanes, it’s designed to survive a crash and record sensor information during the race. Over the years, the black-box design has benefited from improved electronics. This includes more sophisticated sensors like the g-force sensor that’s part of the earphone drivers use for communication.
Such information is handy in recreating a crash, but it can also be useful to medical personnel who are helping the driver after a severe collision. Likewise, improvements in storage allow more information to be recorded, providing more accurate crash reconstruction after the fact.
Electronics, especially video, are apparent to those watching the race on television. The in-car views provided by tiny cameras are given to teams for races, but the teams have to pay for the footage if they want access to the feed.
These cameras are extremely small and light, so including more than one is easy. On occasion, a team may also rent a system for diagnostic purposes to target a specific area on a car, such as a troublesome component. Even thermal imaging will come into play if it can help solve a problem. There’s also a pair of high-speed cameras at the finish line for those photo finishes.
The pit is under camera coverage as well. This video is normally examined after a race to see where problems may have occurred or to help the pit crew optimize how it services the car.
BEFORE AND AFTER THE RACE Over the years, significant change has occurred in pre-race design and practicerun analysis as well as post-race analysis. Applications developed using tools such as SolidWork, Matlab, and LabVIEW are being used to a team’s advantage.
These applications tend to be very customized, and teams prefer to keep the applications and the information gleaned a secret, as they can help provide the edge in winning the next race. Modeling and simulation help teams optimize the areas they can change, such as the suspension, springs, and tires. Drivers are pushing their cars to the edge, and this type of modeling can highlight limitations and what happens when ambitions meet chemistry and physics.
Off the shelf logging units like Pi Research’s Pi Sigma are designed for race cars (Fig. 7). Sealed boxes with conduction cooling and locking plugs will be familiar to anyone dealing with rugged environments. It is matched with analysis software tools like Pi Toolbox.
Two Fig. 4's, and 2nd Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 should be 5 & 6.
Chip -May 08, 2009
In regards to automatic transmissions at Indy I remember that either A.J. Foyt and/or Dan Gurney used them in at least one race. I also remember that the Hall Chapparel (not Indy) race cars used automatic transmissions. This is not new technology just additional gears and better control in my opinion.
Anonymous -May 07, 2009
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