1engineer
Moderator
I try to answer questions here as plainly as possible because let's face it, who really cares about the math right? Well, the truth is math is a big part of safety and vehicle design.
The Winch Power thread yesterday reminded me that safety is a key concern with most everyone and their 4Runners. In that thread I presented the concept of "Acceptable Risk" which basically means you decide on how safe you want to be with the mods you make.
Well, engineers try to be as safe as they can when they design products that can really hurt you if you are not careful. On that note it reminded me of a project my son just completed.
As some of you know my son is working on his BSME and is a junior this year. As many of you are engineers yourself, you know the third year is when you get into the meat and potatoes world of engineering. In my son's Advanced Dynamics class his team just finished up one of several projects. This one was on vehicle dynamics and included a "tripped rollover" component. A tripped rollover is a condition where a vehicle is sliding sideways and the tires hit an immovable object such as a curb. This project also included:
Skids
Slides
Roll Overs
My son's team, unbeknownst to me, chose my vehicle for their test. I won't bore you with the math but the project took about 16 pages. They also used ground conditions of:
Snow
Gravel
Wet Pavement
Dry Pavement
Their job was to calculate vehicle speeds in these conditions that would result in skids, slides, roll overs and tripped roll overs. It was also required they use grades of 0, 15 and 30 percent. I read the report and the professor allowed them a generous amount of assumptions such as location of CG, tire type, tire location, suspension dynamics and a host of other things that in real life could not be assumed. All in all it was a good report that interested me from a 4Runner owner's and an engineer's point of view.
My point to all of this is safety. We know there are some really good engineers working for Toyota and all this has been professionally calculated and tested by them long before we were allowed our first look way back in 2009. It is refreshing to know though that a new crop of engineers are learning about both vehicle dynamics and safety as they get ready to enter the real world, and such things as roll overs are getting re checked as projects in the classroom.
I won't publish any of the results here because with all of the assumptions the professor let them have the results will not be applicable to the real world. This was all calculated and theoretical so no 5th gen 4Runners were hurt as no actual testing was done. There was computer modeling simulations though! I can tell you this: The 4Runner was not in last place compared to other team's vehicles!
The Winch Power thread yesterday reminded me that safety is a key concern with most everyone and their 4Runners. In that thread I presented the concept of "Acceptable Risk" which basically means you decide on how safe you want to be with the mods you make.
Well, engineers try to be as safe as they can when they design products that can really hurt you if you are not careful. On that note it reminded me of a project my son just completed.
As some of you know my son is working on his BSME and is a junior this year. As many of you are engineers yourself, you know the third year is when you get into the meat and potatoes world of engineering. In my son's Advanced Dynamics class his team just finished up one of several projects. This one was on vehicle dynamics and included a "tripped rollover" component. A tripped rollover is a condition where a vehicle is sliding sideways and the tires hit an immovable object such as a curb. This project also included:
Skids
Slides
Roll Overs
My son's team, unbeknownst to me, chose my vehicle for their test. I won't bore you with the math but the project took about 16 pages. They also used ground conditions of:
Snow
Gravel
Wet Pavement
Dry Pavement
Their job was to calculate vehicle speeds in these conditions that would result in skids, slides, roll overs and tripped roll overs. It was also required they use grades of 0, 15 and 30 percent. I read the report and the professor allowed them a generous amount of assumptions such as location of CG, tire type, tire location, suspension dynamics and a host of other things that in real life could not be assumed. All in all it was a good report that interested me from a 4Runner owner's and an engineer's point of view.
My point to all of this is safety. We know there are some really good engineers working for Toyota and all this has been professionally calculated and tested by them long before we were allowed our first look way back in 2009. It is refreshing to know though that a new crop of engineers are learning about both vehicle dynamics and safety as they get ready to enter the real world, and such things as roll overs are getting re checked as projects in the classroom.
I won't publish any of the results here because with all of the assumptions the professor let them have the results will not be applicable to the real world. This was all calculated and theoretical so no 5th gen 4Runners were hurt as no actual testing was done. There was computer modeling simulations though! I can tell you this: The 4Runner was not in last place compared to other team's vehicles!
