Race Car Vehicle Dynamics (book/workbook set) [Hardcover]

William F. Milliken (Author), Douglas L. Milliken (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0768001218 | ISBN-13: 978-0768001211 | Publication Date: November 1997

Includes Race Car Vehicle Dynamics Program Suite on CD-ROM, a valuable learning tool and brand new addition to the RCVD series!

Written for the engineer as well as the race car enthusiast, Race Car Vehicle Dynamics (the original classic) gives a comprehensive treatment of vehicle dynamics and its application in a racing environment. RCVD, now in its sixth printing, is also widely used as a college textbook and has been an SAE best seller since its introduction.

Race Car Vehicle Dynamics: Problems, Answers and Experiments is a supplement to RCVD. It expands on the former RCVD Workbook in a number of ways:

Detailed worked solutions to all of the problems
Problems for every chapter in RCVD, including many new problems
The RCVD Program Suite (for Windows) with accompanying exercises
Experiments to try with your own vehicle
Educational appendix with additional references and course outlines
Well illustrated with over 90 figures and graphs

In addition to students, these worked solutions should be of interest to a wide audience, greatly expanding the examples presented in the original RCVD. The Program Suite was originally used in conjunction with a university course and has been specially developed for inclusion with this book. The educational supplement will be of interest to users who are unable to attend formal classes and wish to continue their education.

Engineers and designers of passenger cars, as well as race cars, will find worked solutions to many common problems.

Including Chassis Design: Principles and Analysis, this is the fourth vehicle dynamics book by Milliken and Milliken to be published by SAE.

--This text refers to the Spiral-bound edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Society of Automotive Engineers Inc (November 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0768001218
• ISBN-13: 978-0768001211
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 8.2 x 2.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,703,503 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gives a complete statement of race car dynamics, April 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Race Car Vehicle Dynamics (R146) (Hardcover)

This book is a necessity for anyone who is seriously interested in understanding what happens concerning all aspects of the car. Whether mechanic, engineer, or general fan this book says it all. If you really want to understand the book completely, I would recommend at least a brush up in Calculus, and some trig.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The mother of all books about race cars, April 3, 2005

By 

Maxim Masiutin (Chisinau, Republic of Moldova) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Race Car Vehicle Dynamics (R146) (Hardcover)

This is the mother of all books about race cars. If you were missing deep theoretical background on tuning your sports car or street car, this volume is for you. It is impossible to describe in detail what this textbook is about, in a single review.

What I liked most is the chapter on dampers (shock absorbers). It gave me the answers to lots of questions that I had before reading this published work, for example how to choose "ride/handling compromise" when adjusting damping ratio? Why stiffer dampers are more comfortable on large-amplitude bumps, while softer dampers provide smoother ride on small-amplitude bumps? "In an automobile, a suspension is used to reduce the discomfort induced by unevenness in the highway. As measure of discomfort is the vertical acceleration that the passenger is subjected while sitting in the vehicle". The book demonstrates the model where the passenger is linked to the road via three springs in a sequence: tire, coil and the seat, and one damper (shock absorber). There is a graph showing passenger vertical acceleration depending on the amplitude (frequency) of road irregularities, for distinct shock absorbers with various damping ratios. For a stiff shock absorber this diagram shows relatively flat curve, where the vertical acceleration is almost independent of frequency of bumps. For the soft shock absorber, there is a very high peak (several times higher comparing to a stiff damper) of vertical acceleration for the low-frequency bumps, and this acceleration curve quickly decays as the frequency increases. There is another graph, "transient load transfer analysis", which shows that with soft dampers, the suspension load in a turn fluctuates. This is another answer to the question why stiffer dampers (to a certain extent) provide better handling.

The order of the chapters is somewhat sporadic. The books is a mixture of sections of engineering information (formulas), historical background, sketches (e.g. torque arm rear axle suspension), recipes (KONI's published instructions for damper adjustment), and sample data (e.g. Goodyear tire data). Nevertheless, the work is so deep that in a couple of years after it's publication, it had been started being used as a university textbook. Based on comments from faculty, SAE have requested the authors to prepare a supplementary book of problems, to help the universities to examine the students.

I also recommend "Theory of Ground Vehicles", by J. Y. Wong, in addition to this book.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars PERFECT!, May 11, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Race Car Vehicle Dynamics (book/workbook set) (Hardcover)

Who better to publish a book about vehicle dynamics than the Society of Automotive Engineers? I was a bit sketchy about the price at first, but I probably would have spent five times as much buying all the different books it would take to get all the information in this one! It only took me a week or two to get it, even though it said something like 3 to 5 weeks. Anyway, highly recommended!