Design Article
Fuel injection, ECUs and the pressure of NASCAR racing
Brian Fuller
11/20/2012 12:15 PM EST
The pressure to succeed
How'd they do?
"This year, we haven't had a single ECU fail on the track," Nelson said. "Forty cars run in NASCAR every week. That's 600,000 competition miles" or about 24 times around the Earth.
"For us to understand that almost anything on a car will break and you put a brand new piece of technology in a car and not have it break once is amazing," Nelson added.
But carbueretors worked well for 40 years. It it ain't broke, why fix it, right?
"The short answer is all race series are protective of the spectacle," said Dr. Peter van Manen, managing director at McLaren Electronic Systems. "They don't want to upset the racing series. Cars were running well with carburetors, but it was inevitable that they would move to fuel injection. In terms of performance you get better drivability and fuel economy."
In addition, this shift was an opportunity to adopt and showcase what most car buyers already have in their personal cars. That's an interesting reversal of the historic technology-adoption path, which often starts with race cars (think rear-view mirrors at the early Indianapolis 500 races) and trickles down into mainstream cars. Racing, of course, has always been part lab, part consumer showroom for the automotive manufacturers.
But in this case, technology in widespread commercial use finally found its way into NASCAR. So if that's the case, is ethernet next?
No, according to van Manen.
"We've avoided ethernet because the signal levels are low compared to CAN," he said. "The level of high-energy electrical noise around a car is very high. On that one, we're waiting on the automotive guys for ethernet that can run in a noisy environment. At the moment we'd be cautious about ethernet on the car."
Victory lap?
Unfortunately for McLaren, Freescale and other components suppliers, there's no time to rest on laurels after a successful new ECU introduction .
In less than two years, Formula 1, which uses fuel injection, is moving to a new engine platform.
"In 2014, Formula 1 moves to a different powerful train, direct injection turbo charged engine with parallel hybrid with exhaust gas energy recovery and restrictions on fuel flow," van Manen said. "There will be a lot more attention on torque and energy and energy consumption. That's the biggest challenge. That's stepping in a lot of different elements."
Back to work.
Related stories:
--Electronica: Freescale auto push ranges from radar to MCU
--Seven new Freescale dev kits for automotive motor control
--Auto apps accelerated by triple-play graphics cores
How'd they do?
"This year, we haven't had a single ECU fail on the track," Nelson said. "Forty cars run in NASCAR every week. That's 600,000 competition miles" or about 24 times around the Earth.
"For us to understand that almost anything on a car will break and you put a brand new piece of technology in a car and not have it break once is amazing," Nelson added.
But carbueretors worked well for 40 years. It it ain't broke, why fix it, right?
Out with the old...
(Source: NASCAR.com)"The short answer is all race series are protective of the spectacle," said Dr. Peter van Manen, managing director at McLaren Electronic Systems. "They don't want to upset the racing series. Cars were running well with carburetors, but it was inevitable that they would move to fuel injection. In terms of performance you get better drivability and fuel economy."
In addition, this shift was an opportunity to adopt and showcase what most car buyers already have in their personal cars. That's an interesting reversal of the historic technology-adoption path, which often starts with race cars (think rear-view mirrors at the early Indianapolis 500 races) and trickles down into mainstream cars. Racing, of course, has always been part lab, part consumer showroom for the automotive manufacturers.
But in this case, technology in widespread commercial use finally found its way into NASCAR. So if that's the case, is ethernet next?
No, according to van Manen.
"We've avoided ethernet because the signal levels are low compared to CAN," he said. "The level of high-energy electrical noise around a car is very high. On that one, we're waiting on the automotive guys for ethernet that can run in a noisy environment. At the moment we'd be cautious about ethernet on the car."
Victory lap?
Unfortunately for McLaren, Freescale and other components suppliers, there's no time to rest on laurels after a successful new ECU introduction .
In less than two years, Formula 1, which uses fuel injection, is moving to a new engine platform.
"In 2014, Formula 1 moves to a different powerful train, direct injection turbo charged engine with parallel hybrid with exhaust gas energy recovery and restrictions on fuel flow," van Manen said. "There will be a lot more attention on torque and energy and energy consumption. That's the biggest challenge. That's stepping in a lot of different elements."
Back to work.
Related stories:
--Electronica: Freescale auto push ranges from radar to MCU
--Seven new Freescale dev kits for automotive motor control
--Auto apps accelerated by triple-play graphics cores
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agk
11/21/2012 6:24 AM EST
Analyzing 8 cylinders various parameters and controlling the fuel injection to these cylinders at 1000 times per second is quite a high speed processing of data.Probably soon we can see these kind of ECU's in the regular automotive segment.
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