The Rugby Locomotive Testing Station was a British railway testing plant in Rugby , Warwickshire . Originally envisioned by Sir Nigel Gresley as a joint LMS - LNER operation, construction was started in the late 1930s but then deferred by the war. It was eventually opened in 1948 after both its owners had become constituents of British Railways . The location was one with access to both LMS and LNER main lines ( West Coast Main Line and Great Central Main Line ) respectively. The GWR meanwhile had their own testing plant at Swindon Works .
9-528: There was a rolling road to test engines. The testing station was relatively short lived; the final test was made in 1965, and the plant was officially closed in 1970, however the building continued to be used until the early-1980s as an outpost of the British Rail Research Division , until it was demolished in 1984. The site is now an industrial estate. The records of the Rugby LTS are part of
18-456: A controlled environment, and is used for a wide variety of vehicle testing and development purposes. There are many types of chassis dynamometer according to the target application - for example, emissions measurement, miles accumulation chassis dynamometer (MACD), Noise-Vibration-Harshness (NVH or "Acoustic") Application, Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) testing, end of line (EOL) tests, performance measurement and tuning. Another basic division
27-436: Is by type of vehicle - motorcycles, cars, trucks, tractors or the size of the roller - mostly 25", 48", 72", but also any other. Modern dynamometers used for development are mostly one roller to the wheel construction and the vehicle wheel is placed the top of the roller. Older constructional solutions are two roller per wheel and vehicle is place between these rollers - this design solution is cheaper and simpler, however, due to
36-443: Is restrained and so called vehicle adaptation has to be performed. During vehicle adaptation dynamometer automatically slowing down from set speed, changing its own "dyno parameters" and trying to get same deceleration in given intervals as on real road. Those parameters are then valid for this vehicle type. Changing of set simulated inertia it is possible to simulate vehicle ability to accelerate if fully loaded, with setting gradient it
45-608: The National Railway Collection held by the National Railway Museum . News reel footage of the site is available on YouTube . 52°22′45″N 1°14′36″W / 52.379236°N 1.243421°W / 52.379236; -1.243421 Chassis dynamometer A chassis dynamometer , informally referred to as a rolling road or a dyno , is a mechanical device that uses one or more fixed roller assemblies to simulate different road conditions within
54-509: The "behavior" of the vehicle on a real road. In order to get "road parameters", vehicle must be driving on ideal flat road with no wind from any direction, gear set to neutral and time needed to slow down without braking is measured in certain intervals e.g. 100–90 km/h, 90–80 km/h, 80–70 km/h 70–60 km/h etc. Slowing down from higher speed takes shorter time mainly due to air resistance. Those parameters are later set in dynamometer workstation, together with vehicle inertia. Vehicle
63-404: The forces that are applied to a vehicle when driven on an actual road course to be simulated through the tires and calculated in the test results. Increasing air drag with the speed on the road manifests as increasing braking force of the vehicle wheels. The aim is to make the vehicle on the dynamometer accelerate and decelerate the same way as on a real road. First you need to know the parameters of
72-401: The power train, the measured power at the wheels is about 15 to 20 percent lower than the power measured directly at the output of engine crankshaft (measuring device with this purpose is called engine testbed). Because the vehicle is secured to the chassis dynamometer, it prevents variables such as wind resistance to alter the data set. The chassis dynamometer is designed to add the sum of all
81-573: The requirements for accuracy and strict limits is no longer used for the development of new vehicles, but only as a test dynamometer at the end of the line or to measure the performance of the engine without dismantling, or performance tuning in "garage" companies. Directly measured variables are only force on the torque transducer (i.e. loadcell) and revolutions measured on the role encoder dynamometer. All other variables are calculated based on known design (i.e. roller radius and loadcell mounting). Due to friction and mechanical losses in various parts of
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