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Overall inertia of the vehicle model

Question

Can you please explain to me how the overall inertia tensor is calculated. I deleted the values for Inertia from all the components (body, tires, wheel carriers). In this case I expect the inertia tensor to be a matrix of zeros. However, it has some values that I can’t find a source for.

Can you please elaborate how are these values are calculated and to which component are they related?

Solution

The overall inertia tensor is not zero in this case because there are still masses (wheels, wheel carriers) in different locations of the vehicle. The overall tensor would only be zero if all the masses of the vehicle were located in the exact same point. The masses and inertias of these additional bodies are set in the "bodies" tab of the Vehicle Dataset:

If you set their rotational inertias to zero, they can be considered as point masses. But a point mass can nevertheless create a rotational inertia if you rotate it around an different axis (the rotational inertia of a point mass is m*r², where r is the distance to the axis of rotation). So for example if you set the inertias of the wheels to zero, they still have a mass and therefore they create a moment of inertia if the vehicle is rotated around its z-axis.

In the calculation of the vehicle overall inertia tensor, all these aspects are considered.

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  • Date: 17.07.2019
  • Product: CarMaker
  • Version: 13.0
  • Component: Vehicle Model
  • Language: English

Tags

interia tensor
Vehicle Body
Vehicle Data Set