Technology adapted from Formula 1 is being used on tracked military vehicles to improve their handling and speed across the battlefield.
Engineers at BAE Systems have applied the new Active Damping upgrade system to current variants of the CV90 combat vehicle family – breaking speed records in rough terrain and increasing the CV90’s agility by reducing its pitch acceleration by about 40 per cent.
First introduced into F1 in the 1990s, the Active Damping system works by sensing the speed of the vehicle and layout of the terrain ahead and responding by pressurising the suspension to keep the vehicle on a level plane at all times.
This increased stability is helping to reduce the wear and tear on the armoured vehicles and cut through-life repair costs for each vehicle, despite them being able to travel 30–40 per cent faster on rough terrain.
For the crew of a CV90, the technology means a smoother ride and a reduction in fatigue – an important factor on the battlefield. The reduced vertical motion also increases the gunner’s probability of finding and hitting targets.
The suspension system usually operates on carbon fibre racing cars weighing no more than 700kg, but engineers at BAE Systems adapted it to use on heavy tracked vehicles weighing as much as 35 tonnes.
In recent trials, a CV90 fitted with Active Damping set a new speed record on a rough terrain course, beating main battle tanks.
In a statement, Dan Lindell, BAE Systems CV90 platform manager said: “Adapting the Active Damping system for the first time from a lightweight car to a heavy tracked vehicle such as the CV90 was a unique challenge for us, but this advanced technology will deliver results to our customers in terms of vehicle performance and savings on the through-life costs, as well as providing real benefits to the front line solider.”
The CV90 is designed and built by BAE Systems in Sweden and is one of the largest families of armoured combat vehicles. It is currently used in countries including Norway, Finland and Denmark and has taken part in global operations including UN and NATO collaborations.
This “world first” is a design that’s already 25 years out of date, and the F1 technology was true Active Suspension, NOT active damping. Their functions are not the same.
“The Active Damping system works by sensing the speed of the vehicle and layout of the terrain ahead and responding by pressurising the suspension to keep the vehicle on a level plane at all times.” I very much doubt it – it’s simply not capable of doing that! How well does it react when only one track hits a bump? That’s far more likely in the real world.
Any reduction in wear and tear is likely to be negligible, to judge from the video. Such complexity may add to the time spent in the workshops on servicing and repair. The sophistication of German tank engineering was their downfall, against the crude but reliable T34.
It’s a bitter irony; Active Suspension was banned in 1994, which arguably caused Ayrton Senna to lose control. It was judged to be ‘too good’ but so expensive the richest teams won. It’s not fair when money can buy dominance in a so-called ‘free’ market, so the FIA changed the regulations.
Active Damping is severely compromised and the cost limits it to the military and prestige car markets. True Active Suspension does work, but isn’t commercially viable. My passive Stable Suspension would add hardly anything to the price of a Tata Nano, once new components can be churned out on high volume production runs. Tooling up for the change is disruptive, naturally.
I can (literally) give you designs which won’t bounce (or roll, or pitch). If the springs don’t launch the 35 tonne vehicle into the air like that, they don’t even need damping! The suspension medium should be confined to heave mode. The same is true of F1. Bouncing over the tiny kerbs causes one or more wheels to ‘take air’. You don’t get any grip from a slick that’s lost contact with the track!
The F400 Carving was hailed by Mercedes as the car of the future. It was Active – it failed to work. I could’ve saved them the bother, and £2m. Cars will bank through the turns (tilt-steer) in future.
Truly stable suspension would have spared their blushes at the launch of the A-Class. The ‘elk test’ problem “was solved by adding electronic stability control and modifying the suspension.” It cost £850m to develop the A-Class (1997) and £100m to ‘fix’ it. Right-first-time is cheaper. That ‘fix’ was just another, but different ride/handling compromise. ESC is the industry’s implicit confession that their design convention always produces an unstable vehicle, which can kill the unwary.
Five years ago, I offered proven passive engineering solutions to MAT:-
“Many thanks for your interest in discussing your ideas. I will read what you sent me and get back to you.” – Programme Director | McLaren Applied Technologies Limited. 4 March 2010.
After that initial courteous reply the silence was deafening. Such is their arrogance they couldn’t even entertain offering me a confidential disclosure agreement. Neither could BMW, or Honda, or Williams, or Virgin Marussia, or MIRA, or Gibbs Technologies, or the DSTL and QinetiQ (2002). This against a background of:-
“The MoD has spent £207 million on an armoured vehicle that has yet to leave the drawing board, despite seven years of development.” 26/4/10. For that money, I’d build dozens of demonstrators, one for every class of vehicle you can think of. I’d especially like to do a purpose-built ambulance, a far better solution than the current practice of converting crude commercial vans.
What have BAE Systems spent on this fool’s errand? (i.e. trying to make suspension work without separating its shock absorption and chassis levelling functions.) If Dan Lindell wants to know how to make a better vehicle, at lower cost, an e-mail to davesmart@greenbee.net will get results. It isn’t going to be an engineering challenge, far from it, but it might be a psychological challenge, because the CV90 would be seen for what it is – an obsolete, inherently compromised design.
“The rear suspension on the bloodhound is a compromise on a number of levels. . . I would be interested to see your layout designs, which are stable?” Bloodhound SSC’s suspension designer. 2 July 2009. Yes, my 2001 model proves that Stable Suspension is – erm – stable! But Richard Noble doesn’t agree with making money out of British ingenuity, so they never got to see my designs. I can only transfer this knowledge to some ‘body’ (and the public sector is outlawed here) that has the good sense and wealth to buy numerous patents. (not from me – I can’t afford any)
If we have to import manufactured goods we might at least insist on a decent design specification, and earn a little money from our IPR. However, any renaissance in UK manufacturing productivity demands that we invest heavily in R&D and BUILD all the new kit HERE. The government has to evaluate the technical options, pick the obvious winners and pay for their development. After all, the Treasury foots the bill for the MoD’s (competitive!?) procurement fiascos:-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/8944352/MoD-spent-1-billion-on-tank-programme-which-produced-no-vehicles.html
An aside: “In April 2014, Marussia Motors was disbanded, with staff leaving to join a government-run technical institute.” When the private sector fails, the public sector picks up the pieces, if there is value in the assets. We have a skills shortage in the UK and what we do have should be put to better use, not wasted on pointless vanity projects. (like HS2 and Bloodhound)
I read David Smart’s post with an increasing anger: something I also noted in his concerns. I know nothing of ‘his’ field of operations: suspension of moving vehicles? [I did spend several ‘school years’ in company with Dr Harvey Postlethwaite-indeed as his head-of-house and platoon sergeant (like I did to Sir Dick Evans of B Ae and Thatcher’s favourite capitalist -if that is any accolade) I used to make him double on the spot with his rifle above his head for having dirty brasses on Corps parade: who I gather was one of the 70s/80s gurus of motor sport design] But what comes across so vividly is that here, and once again, we seem to have a very well motivated, educated and competant Engineer who is literally made to feel ‘a stranger in his own ‘technology based ‘ land’: perhaps because his ideas and ideals are somewhat ‘higher’ than those already in place: and because the NIH factor has reared its ugly head yet again.
Is there a solution? Please?
Apropos pointless vanity projects:
at my last University teaching post, I did propose to a colleague (heavily involved in developments in Advanced manufacturing for apparently ‘hi-tech’ machinery (ie jet engines) that there might be some benefit in applying enhanced thinking to the very ordinary processes used to create (not only perhaps scores of Engines per year) the millions of containers per hour used to package liquids and solids in beverages and ingredients: look on any supermarket shelf if you wish to see the scope of the potential. “Yes, but not me! -that’s not elevated enough an activity for an academic!” When I pointed out that by my estimate more weight of food is cut than metal every day, at least he could see at what I was getting! And the benefit would be continuous, and easily recognised, rewarded and received?
Did he miss something?
Hi Mike,
I add a little anger for effect! It’s surprising that I’m not a bitter and twisted grumpy old man, but I don’t get stressed about things I can do nothing about. Life’s too short. Drop me an e-mail if you want to know more.
http://www.4coffshore.com/windfarms/conquest-offshore-presents-floating-installation-for-offshore-wind-nid1764.html
“While hammering the pile, hydraulic cylinders ACTIVELY compensate for the surge, sway and heave motions of the barge to ensure the verticality within limits. The Conquest MB1 barge creates a game-changer in the offshore wind industry.” (another world first?)
Oh no it doesn’t! The entire industry is engaged in playing the wrong game. i.e. installing sea-bed fixed HAWTs, when all offshore wind should be floating VAWTs, stabilised by means of a passive, integrated-displacement wave energy converter. (i.e. self-levelling)
The title I gave to my patent application (withdrawn before publication) for Stable Suspension was “Stability by Means of Integrated Displacement” Isn’t serendipity a wonderful thing. ALL this has developed from the desire to make a better bike, would you believe?! (see Dave2020’s ‘avatar’)
http://www.nippon.com/en/views/b01506/
The Japanese concluded that the practical limit for, “fixed-bottom turbines is a depth of around 30 meters – any deeper than that would make construction unfeasible.” But in our blinkered devotion to the not-fit-for-purpose HAWT Europe presses on regardless.
“The potential is there for offshore wind power generation of approximately eight times the combined generating capacity of all (of Japan’s) power plants.” It’s plain common sense to add wave power to that, and there is plenty of tidal energy to be tapped, even though its range in Tokyo Bay is no more than 2m.
In shallow sea, foundations and installation accounts for 40% of the cost. That is bound to rise, in spite of (because of!) all these ill-conceived technical advances for exploiting deeper seas. Three huge projects beyond 30m – the Argyll, Celtic and Atlantic Arrays – have all been cancelled. One thousand tonnes of steel per turbine, doing nothing to harvest OR store any energy – what a waste. 91km of inter-array cables – that’s a waste of precious metal:-
http://www.4coffshore.com/windfarms/baltic-2-starts-generating-nid1711.html
In David MacKay’s calculations, £3bn was to be wasted on jack-up barges, a class of vessel that’ll have nothing to do (but decommissioning), when floating wind/wave is the industry standard.
I didn’t detail the human cost of dodgy chassis dynamics. . . In 2005 Bosch claimed that, if their ESP were made mandatory, it would save 25,000 lives across Europe over a five-year period, but that estimate may have been biased by a desire to improve their ROI?
Sir Richard Branson praised the strength of the Range Rover, which ‘saved’ his family from serious injury in an accident on the M40 in 1994. That was an ‘elk test’ incident, swerving to avoid a car that changed lane. A car that wasn’t so unstable wouldn’t be prone to roll-over!
“He drives a Range Rover, and even that is given to him each year as thanks for some nice things he said about the brand after surviving an accident in one.”
Kind regards, Dave
David. Did you ever try speaking to Morgan or Ariel about your suspension?
Sitting on the ideas isn’t going to do any good.
Perhaps you can crowdfund your patent applications?
No Mike, I haven’t tried them. By 2008 I’d reached the conclusion that automotive engineers were so enamoured of the all-round-independent (a spring for each wheel) convention, that they all had great difficulty imagining how anything could work better, despite a model proof of concept that a 10-year old can understand. So I bought a Smart Roadster Coupe, to convert. The motoring press at the time described it as “a dynamic gem”. I figured that a ‘seat-of-the-pants’ drive in a car with no ride/handling compromise should demonstrate the difference. The engineering details would all be out of sight, as with my model.
There are just too many insurmountable hurdles. First, very few companies offer a CDA, so they never get to see the model. The suspension designer at Williams F1 asked me on the phone for more details, so they could decide whether to ask their lawyers to draw up a document! Er no, it doesn’t work that way.
I have only one confidentiality agreement that isn’t time-limited. It has a clause stipulating it’d be void, if its existence were ever revealed to a third party. I like to be accurate in everything I say and I gave a false impression above. QinetiQ gave me a CDA, but it covered two years and when I approached the DSTL they declined to renew it, in breach of an official Code of Practice mandating staff compliance in evaluating ‘inward’ innovation.
You’re aware of the shady practices that corrupted the privatisation of DERA I expect? QinetiQ’s engineers would have loved to make a demonstrator, but the bean counters wouldn’t let them. (ditto, with MG Rover) I doubt very much that any small car maker could justify the risk and expense. They’re reluctant to invest in work that depends on patent ‘protection’ for its ROI. That applies to their own ideas and NIH is the nail in the coffin. You face the same scenario with universities – they can’t afford to use IP legislation (effectively) themselves. Why would they spend anything to help an outsider?
Which brings us to Timothy’s comment. Making the existence of new designs known to all and sundry, worldwide is hardly “sitting on ideas.” Premature patenting is business suicide and I’d be ashamed of conning people into pouring their money down that particular drain. The only viable way to proceed is to keep the important (patentable) detail secret by conducting the R&D in secret. Patents are published, whether they’re granted or not. Why would you tell the world what you’re doing, before spending the time and money getting it to a production-ready design? A patent only lasts 25 years. Annual renewal fees on my bike design were costing me £1,500. Sooner or later you have to cut your losses. A common practice is to file ‘spoilers’, which aren’t taken to grant. That costs peanuts – one national application becomes prior art.
In 1989 I showed my patent lawyer my proposals for car suspension. “That will be defined as a separate idea from the bike. You’ll have to file other patents to cover it.” The car industry would also want to see wider coverage than I had to ‘protect’ my bike design – stymied, and a denial of human rights, by any criterion.
“Honda may contact you, if any patent application you may file is considered to be of interest.” In a letter from their European Patent Attorneys – 10 May 2006. They have the upper hand. You have to put in years of work, at astronomical cost and they’ll be able to decide at they’re leisure, whether the idea has any profit potential. If they do like it, the first consideration will be – “How can we get the benefit of this novel design without paying any royalties?” You’re shafted, every which way.
Naturally, nobody readily admits that the cars they sell (as state-of-the-art, with F1 design input!) have both a poor ride quality and poor stability – the ride/handling compromise. They’d dream up every ‘reason’ they could to rubbish the new and endorse the status quo. (ESC)
Postscript:
As I was saying – 25 years of wasted opportunities for industrial renaissance, and ALL because of the psychological inertia of our political power and professional engineers. Tens of thousands of damaged and lost lives have to be added to the economic loss. The gross injustices (high cost, no ‘protection’) of patents SUPPRESS innovation:-
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/home/blog/guest-blog/its-patently-obvious-isnt-it
“This is the opposite of what is required”!!!
Highly competent engineers may study my concept with a healthy (scientific) scepticism, but then dismiss it, thinking there are surely sound (technical) reasons why these designs haven’t been tried out (as Active Suspension was), to challenge the industry’s endemic convention.
Anyone familiar with the subject will know that the principle of isolating the spring medium from chassis levelling was first described (very badly) in a 1932 patent. A better presentation was filed in this century by Erik Zapletal, but his design includes superfluous chassis set-up tweaks for heave, roll, pitch and warp. (KISS!) That complexity is eliminated, if the SINGLE spring is mounted in the correct location within the system (my model has NO damping). The supreme irony – the original patent got it right in principle. Fig. 5. “Practical Balanced Suspension System” illustrates the error:-
http://www.theoryinpracticeengineering.com/resources/dynamics/balanced%20suspension.pdf
Erik notes that the No. 1 “disadvantage” is NOT technical. He’s right, it IS psychological inertia!!
‘Autosport’ did an analysis of Formula One’s vain (in both senses of the word) attempts to cure the insoluble technical contradictions; “so many permutations as to be fraught with potential problems and wrong paths to follow” – using that bewildering sentence I love to quote; “This is the opposite of what is required”, which begs the question; “So why do you keep doing it that way?!”
An academic in charge of a university motorsport team could hardly contain his enthusiasm when he first saw my model, but by the time of our second meeting (after his superiors told him it wasn’t the university’s ‘business’ to help me!) he’d reverted to the usual line that conventional design was so advanced it did the job well enough. He gave the example of a rally car ‘taking air’ and landing safely, four-square. That’s the ONLY circumstance where it can work and the CV90 test was chosen to demonstrate that to best advantage! A real-world test would show that warp, pitch and roll are still a compromise. That’s why there aren’t any shots of the tank crossing the ridge at, say, 45°. NO improvement in chassis dynamics would be evident in that case.
Money was the only reason they didn’t co-operate. Years later I came across a website page from another department at the same university. It described a collaborative study, done with funding from Land Rover, on an off-road concept which had a remarkable visual resemblance to my model. It had to be more than a coincidence and my casual comment prompted it’s immediate removal. I honestly don’t care, except for the fact that they didn’t understand what they were doing, because the crucial design detail had never been revealed. If they’d asked me how it was done, I’d be only too happy to tell them. Then the conceptual study could have progressed to a demonstrator build and JLR would now own patents to protect their interests – manufacturing ALL new models to run on perfectly sound chassis dynamics, at lower cost, without ‘adaptive’ or ‘active’ systems. (KISS)
I apologise for the ‘shock tactics’ I used here:-
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/news/sheffield-hallam-university-helps-guy-martin-break-downhill-speed-record/1019504.article
But I’d tried everything else, to no avail and my post – 20 Nov 2014 8:00 am. – was nothing more than a simple statement of fact. . . .
Another footnote: A couple of quotes from Colin Chapman. . .
“Any suspension, no matter how poorly designed, can be made to work reasonably well if you just stop it from moving.” (i.e. Hard springs – over-damped) and “Rules are made for the interpretation of wise men and the obedience of fools.” Chapman couldn’t buck the market or the laws of physics. (or physiology; he died young.)
http://www.sportscars.tv/Newfiles/activeridelotus.html
Neither could Mercedes. The F400 ran out of hydraulic power, if you turned too many corners in quick succession! It would’ve priced itself out of the market too.
Let’s understand one thing: True Active Suspension has no springs. When Lotus tried to apply the principle to a sports car they were obliged to revert to the four-spring convention – as a fail-safe, to reduce the power consumption and to cut the exorbitant cost. That re-introduces the ride/handling compromise, which is incurable!
So, BAE and Formula One are BOTH engaged on the same “fool’s errand”:-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/formula1/32684346
Jenson Button said his McLaren was “scary” to drive and he doesn’t expect to score a point in 2015. The 2009 world champion finished 16th at the Spanish Grand Prix, ahead only of the back-of-the-grid Manor cars. “The first 30 laps were the scariest of my life,” Button said. “Every time I touched the throttle at any speed, the rear was just gone. It wasn’t normal.”
Early in 2008 I tried to liberate Jenson from the technical contradictions that are the bane of his (and every driver’s) motor-sporting life. I also asked him to sponsor a uni’ project to convert the Smart Roadster, but my letter was very likely intercepted by some dumb ‘gate-keeper’. He’d said his 2007 car was “a complete dog”! More by accident than design, Brawn found one of the few race-winning permutations in 2009, but by 2010 the ‘black magic’ was lost again.
Ross Brawn was frustrated by idiotic FIA tech’ regs – “We are like Swiss watchmakers, refining to the Nth degree rather than making innovative changes.” But even he didn’t envisage any radical change in the basic concept, which is confined by blinkered, age-old tradition.
I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been told – “they know what they’re doing.” Evidently they don’t have a clue what to do, when they’ve picked one of the many wrong permutations.
The story of my engineering life; “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”