Professional Motorsport Data Analysis: Step 3: Analyse Reliability
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Step 3: Analyse Reliability
05.08
| 00:00 | - Step 3 is going ahead and checking our reliability parameters. |
| 00:04 | As you'll be aware, if we don't have a reliable car, there's really no point to any of this so it is the first step to go make sure everything in the car is behaving reliably and within the bounds that we expect. |
| 00:15 | So the car comes in, we download it, this is the first things we want to go through. |
| 00:19 | Now my personal preference is to make use of reporting tables, I find they are the quickest way to summarise a whole lot of information, then if I find something I'm interested in, I usually go ahead and head over to a time/distance plot of that particular channel that I'm interested in and dig in a little bit further to understand exactly what's going on. |
| 00:37 | So let's have a look at the laptop screen here. |
| 00:40 | The first thing to understand about the channels, about this report table is how we go ahead and customise them so what we've got shown here is I've got two different tabs at the top here for the two different runs that we're going to be comparing. |
| 00:54 | And if I click on this test compare on the top left, it essentially just allows me to look at both of those runs on a single table which is a nice way to summarise the information. |
| 01:04 | So to go ahead and modify this table, all we need to do is come to the right hand side of the table, click on this button for add/remove, everything on this side of the dialogue box is every channel we've got access to, so that's everything that's logged inside the logger we can report on anything that is a logged channel. |
| 01:19 | And in the middle here we've got the option to, for the software to complete some automatic statistics for us so what I mean by that is it can report on the minimum, the maximums, averages, how long it was at the minimum or alternatively how long it was at the maximum, whether it's integrals, distances of the max, whatever, you can see that there are lots of different ways, we can use those statistics to show us whether there's something in the bounds that we expect it for or not. |
| 01:48 | So as an example, let's put one here for the brake pressure, so let's have a look at the maximum brake pressure, all I need to do is select each one of those and press this little box here and that'll send that value to this box here and all we need to do is press OK and come back here and we'll see now we've got the front brake pressure included in there as well. |
| 02:07 | So if I wanted to look at the maximum over every lap I can do that. |
| 02:11 | So you'll see down on the left hand side here, we have the lap number, each one of these areas, so I've got the top one here, I've got one set of data and the bottom one which is denoted by these sort of big black boxes at the top, that's for another run and you can see we've got a different lap number that's incrementing for each of those runs. |
| 02:27 | So for each of these rows is a lap and each of these sections is a run and all I need to do now is scan down any of these of interest. |
| 02:36 | So for example, I've got the external voltage, that's the voltage that the charging system's providing the logger. |
| 02:44 | I've got the minimum, the average and the maximum and all I need to do is scan quickly down there, particularly for battery voltage, I find using the average can be really helpful because most laps, you're going to have a similar average voltage and if you can start seeing a trend, a drop off or something like that, that might indicate to you that you are having a charging problem that's starting to develop. |
| 03:04 | But scanning quickly down these channels here, it does look like things are looking pretty stable. |
| 03:09 | As we move across, let's look at some other ones we've got here so we've got the fuel pressure here, we've got the engine oil pressure, again with the minimum and the average so if you have a minimum value that you're looking to avoid, this is where you want to be going ahead and checking that. |
| 03:28 | Obviously oil pressure is one of the most fundamental things we want to make sure that an engine's got in order for it to survive on track. |
| 03:35 | Keep scrolling across here we've got the inlet, or what's called the pressure turbo which is just the inlet manifold pressure, we can come down and scan down here, seeing what the max is. |
| 03:45 | Again if we understand what's safe for our engine we can just quickly scan down this column here and if we've got a number of interest we want to stay below we can really quickly see if we've stayed below that limit or not. |
| 03:57 | Or alternatively if that maximum's dropping off, it might indicate that there's something going on with the induction or with the engine itself that we might need to look at. |
| 04:05 | So the idea here is I come along here and scan all these channels of interest to see if I've got anything wrong. |
| 04:11 | Now once I've done that, I will generally head over to a time/distance plot of anything of interest. |
| 04:17 | So if I come down here and see there's nothing wrong, there's nothing I need to look at, I can just move on to the driver analysis which is the next step we're going to do but for argument's sake if I wanted to come and look at something, I've got a measures graph set up here and I've got, I can look at one of the runs, so this is one run here, this is another run here or I can look at both of them over top of each other. |
| 04:36 | If there's some particular area of interest, so let's say the fuel rail pressure, if I want to zoom in here, I can come in and look at that in detail and just dig into that in a little bit more detail to understand exactly what's going on, if I've actually got a real problem or whether it's maybe an erroneous sensor or whether it's maybe a certain condition, either the car's sitting there, maybe it's sitting in the pit lane or something like that and so we're not worried about that in that particular case. |
| 04:58 | So that is a quick rundown of how to go ahead and check your reliability once you've downloaded your data. |
| 05:04 | Now let's move onto the next step. |
