In-race front tyre temperature camera the new trend?

[flynfrog]

you could also diy one from a wrecked fancy car

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/fli ... hexacopter

[PlatinumZealot]

On the FRONT WING.. being raced!
There must be an advancement in minituriasation and processing power to have this my friend. think very carefully about it.

I have used thermal imaging cameras to scan power lines and they are quite small indeed, but In Formula 1 have only seen them on the rear floor of the car in front the rear tyre..

Imagine the implications of having LIVE full thermal imaging on ALL FOUR tyres!!

You could tell your car setup is wrong IN REAL TIME.

Once again nothing new. Iv'e seen them mounted in side pods to watch the front tires in testing too. The fact they left them on for the race just means they are really concerned about tire temps not that its some new magical idea. If the other teams thought it would buy them anything they would run them too.

http://scarbsf1.files.wordpress.com/201 ... mirror.jpg

2011
http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/3325 ... spufff.jpg


2006
https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/imag ... mBz6kH8oUg

Not the same. Those don't give the close up square on image. And that makes a huge difference with these cameras. And those ain't the front wing!

[marcush.]

Does anyone know a supplier and price of one of these cameras?

I have posted information about this some time ago .
I used these a few months ago for thermal validation of vehicle underfloor -exhausts and engine compartment btw.

http://www.drs.com/products/RSTA/PDF/Tamarisk.pdf




the challenge was to get a suitable field of view without having to position the camera unrealistically far away from the vehicle as you want to measure under load = at speed ..

The camera was surprisingly affordable ,less than 2K € ,I could even synchronize the video signal with the other temperature probes in Diadem a very nice feature .
As i understand the company also offers software to actually give temperature readouts for every pixel ,which i did not need as we had a good distribution of probes anyways.sizewise it is damn close to the MGP bits..

Flir does similar miniature cameras for industrial applications but at a price...btw these products are all under observation from U.S.Government anti terrorist law...so be prepared to answer a lot of questions what you intend to do....

[flynfrog]

snip....
Not the same. Those don't give the close up square on image. And that makes a huge difference with these cameras. And those ain't the front wing!

OK? How much do you think is gained by mounting it to a shaky wing looking and a wheel moving in 3 axis. How much accuracy would you say is gained by mounting square on vs on a slight angle?

[lz2lps]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTmGuxMR-0w[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0dPsMDif78[/youtube]

These are 4 Tau640 cameras, 12000 EUR each (or ~10 000 USD, probably depending on the place you buy them).
http://www.dronefilmer.com/index.php?op ... uct_id=172

http://scarbsf1.com/blog1/2010/12/02/ty ... abu-dhabi/

The RaceTech article link at the end does not work, but here is another one:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2aSmx_ ... sp=sharing

[PlatinumZealot]

OK? How much do you think is gained by mounting it to a shaky wing looking and a wheel moving in 3 axis. How much accuracy would you say is gained by mounting square on vs on a slight angle?

The temperature distribution in the tangential direction wont change that much as the tyre rotates through an angle equal to range of the cameras vision. It will always be an image of vertical bands no matter how much the wings oscillate up and down due to the high angular velocity of the tyre anyway.

[marcush.]

I have considered the Flir product but the pricing was just outrageous ...but less than those 12k if i´m correct...
The colour is a software thing you assign the grey spectrum to your choice of colour nothing really spectacular.The point is how many frames you are able to grab and put through your analysis software in sensible time .


comparable to Flir TAU product but pricing is a bit more moderate (around 6K€) ...but this is a big box compared to what we see on MGPs front wing....
I had those demonstrated but it did not fit the budget to begin with and you had difficulty to get a decent field of view

http://www.micro-epsilon.com/press/publ ... ameras.pdf

[SectorOne]

Amazing videos there. Never seen anything like it.

[lz2lps]

I have considered the Flir product but the pricing was just outrageous ...but less than those 12k if i´m correct...

I have no idea if the 12K EUR is the lowest price. Just searched for a price,as I was curious how much it is. I read somewhere, someone purchased it for 10 000 USD, but I guess it would be more after taxes in Europe.

Tau 640 Export Info
General: All paperwork and licenses are taken care of by Dronefilmer on behalf of our clients at no extra cost.

Plus, I guess the 'no extra cost' may be included in the price

I saw 2 other web sites with prices - one was 8500 EUR, the other 12 000 NZD (~ 7200 EUR). There are also cameras with lower resolution Tau 320, which are cheaper.

[abw]

Not really sure how much more added value you'd get out of using a camera versus an array of say, six narrow field-of-view IR spot sensors spaced every ~5 cm across each tire. Or even a single IR that rasters slowly to and fro (or that you can aim in real time from pit lane!... but now I'm really getting ridiculous). Engineering concerns related to tires don't occur on a 30 frames/second timeframe. Not to say that if I were a F1 engineer I wouldn't be psyched about thermal cameras. (Oh to be an engineer in a field where money is no object!)

[marcush.]

a picture is worth a thousand words ....I think those flir videos tell it all and give a very direct link to car behaviour...you could adjust the colour spectrum for desireable temps and see when and where you find it during a lap .
an array of 5 spots across the width of a tyre will not really give the same sort of information and not the same sort of Aha experience..
maybe an engineer needs the distance to be able to make a judgement... I remember Newey sitting under a rainsoaked pitwall tent insisting the weather forecast was DRY and according to that logic the cars were on slicks ...unfortunatelly the track was WET ...hm.

[flynfrog]

I'm still not really sure they have that much they can do with the data. You can tell the driver to drive differently in a certain corner, adjust brake bias, adjust air pressure in the next set of tires. Other than that you are kinda stuck.

[WhiteBlue]

I think the cameras will help tremendously when you are having to optimize the setup very quickly in different ambient temperature ranges. You can see if the heat dissipation is localized for instance to the shoulders and not across the wholer contact patch. In such a case a single read out may be misleading. And because they have the recordings the cameras may be very useful even when you do not use them for real time decision making. You can look at the recordings and find out which decisions on setup failed or succeeded for whatever reasons. I was mightily impressed by how much Merc was able to improve Hamilton's setup from FP3 to qualifying. It was a difference of night and day. Easily 0.8 seconds in it. I was wondering if the cameras had something to do with that.

[flynfrog]

I think the cameras will help tremendously when you are having to optimize the setup very quickly in different ambient temperature ranges. You can see if the heat dissipation is localized for instance to the shoulders and not across the wholer contact patch. In such a case a single read out may be misleading. And because they have the recordings the cameras may be very useful even when you do not use them for real time decision making. You can look at the recordings and find out which decisions on setup failed or succeeded for whatever reasons. I was mightily impressed by how much Merc was able to improve Hamilton's setup from FP3 to qualifying. It was a difference of night and day. Easily 0.8 seconds in it. I was wondering if the cameras had something to do with that.

most teams use the cameras for testing and practice.

[abw]

Still think 6 spot readings would be just as useful as video. You'd have to use your brain--or a computer--and interpolate between the readings, but I'd be shocked if F1 brains couldn't make just as much use out of 6x4=24 IR time series as they could out of 4x1 channels of IR video. Don't get me wrong. Cameras would be cool, and I'd encourage their use in testing and for calibrating the spot probes...and I'd definitely encourage their use if I'm wrong about their size and bandwidth. But my guess is that they would be much harder to use in "real time" under race conditions than arrays of spot probes. This is based on my experience using both IR probes and digital cameras to monitor automated welding. The video takes up gigabytes; the IR probes take up bytes.