Just_a_fan wrote:BAE should check their history - Lotus did this in 1992. They fitted active suspension to an Alvis Scorpion.
The engineering on the system in the CV90 actually predates the Lotus Scorpion (I was the project engineer for the MoD on that one for a while and DaveW was intimately involved in the early days of the project) by quite a number of years. The predecessor was put together by AP (IIRC - by the time I was at the MoD it was sitting in a shed) and was a mechanical solution in so far as the valves were controlled by pendulum accelerometers. I think that system is what mutated into the Williams active system rather than the modal isolation 'fast active' system run by Lotus.
The Lotus system, using a couple of Moog valves on each corner station and another couple on each track tensioner (so 12 in all), would never be a serious solution for military use. Trying to maintain that system in less than clean conditions would have been a nightmare - even when we were running on concrete test tracks, there were regular visits to Moog in Tewkesbury for exchange valves.
One of the Lotus reports for the Americans (They paid for the active track tensioning IIRC) is freely available
online. Not much detail in it though. I can believe it's over twenty years ago now. I'd like to do the project again with modern processing power - debugging TMS 320C20 fixed point DSP code was a little challenging. When Lotus got round to detailing the software, they found a lot of minuses that should have been pluses.
