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-----Help Cambridge with next-gen performance car
2000
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am a student on the Postgraduate Certificate 'Advance Course in Design, Manufacture and Management', at Cambridge University. I am developing a project for an automotive engineering business, dealing with all aspects of design and development for competition. The company is engaged in a project to design and manufacture, in low volume, a high performance road car, using chassis construction more common on racing cars than road cars.
If it were possible, I would like to obtain information to recommend a process for surface finishing and assembly of a chassis structure in order to protect it from galvanic corrosion and water entrapment.
The chassis consists of a tubular steel space-frame with aluminium honeycomb panels riveted and bonded to it to form structural shear panels and to enclose the cockpit volume.
For racing car application, corrosion and durability will not cause problems within the operation lifespan of the vehicle. For road use, the lifespan will be longer and the inspection intervals will be infrequent. The chassis structure will be expected to require no maintenance over at least 10 years.
The surface finishing of the various components, the attachment methods and tooling are open to review in order to achieve the objective. The suitability of the material specifications should also be reviewed, although the geometric design would be expensive to change at this stage.
Yours faithfully
Antonio Gimeno Calvo
HND, TCA-ICAI, BSc (Hons) ENG, ACDMM Student
Antonio Gimeno CalvoRay Mallock Limited - Wellingborough
2000
Antonio !
I cannot help you at all re your main question ... but if you want a reasonable life and NOT a weight contributor like galvanizing or undercoating, then use, perhaps, a steel with a low copper content (assuming that tensile-wise, etc. etc. it is OK) and WASH THE THING particularly if you drive on salt roads, OK? I mean to say, wash it underneath.
But I do have one query re performance. That has to do with the fuel 'jets'. In Industry, per se, jet performances vary with size, design and pressure, the ultimate being the so-called atomizing (a totally incorrect appellation) where you might generate droplets of 40 microns versus 300 microns for very good solid cone 1/8" jets.
Consider, dear Student, explosives. That aluminum or even tungsten can 'fire up' very nicely, thank you, if you keep the micron size down to, 50 microns (I've forgotten if that's the right figure). Consider that the smaller the micron size, the greater the surface area for a given weight. That a 20 micron droplet contains, weight-wise, the equivalent of around l00 droplets of l0 microns. Ergo, the smaller the generated fuel droplet, the greater the fuel efficiency.
I used to dabble in mist eliminators, high efficiency ones but they wouldn't be any good for automotive purposes.
Just food for thought
Cheers!
Freeman Newton [deceased]
(It is our sad duty to advise that Freeman passed away
April 21, 2012. R.I.P. old friend).
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