SAE Papers - Hit or miss

Fairly on-topic.

Perhaps you're like me - in that your formal training in tire & vehicle dynamics pretty much amounts to nil. To a degree I'm almost happy that's the way things turned out. Forces you to think for yourself in a field immersed in hand-waving, subjective experiences in a narrow scope, and bullshit.

Anyway, the Society of Automotive Engineers website is a nice resource for being able to dig through their massive collection of member-submitted technical papers. Authors range from college students to industry professionals, and topics can be on aerodynamics, vehicle handling, drive train, brakes, design - you name it. Good to peruse when looking for extra bits of knowledge, experience, or information. In fact, I'm even listed as an author / contributor for an upcoming paper. Go me!

Unfortunately the content of the papers is a bit "hit or miss." Can be good, can be crap (don't worry, the paper I'm on isn't crap). Really have to exercise extreme caution in what you take out of some of these papers, given that seemingly a lot of them are based on opinion and theory without a tremendous amount of hard, factual, objective data to back it up. As such, one of my rules of thumb is to avoid papers written by FSAE students. Still worth checking out. If you're an engineering student, I'd say there's a good chance that you can get copies of the papers for free at your engineering / math library. If you're an employee of a large automotive OEM or supplier, chances are they are easily available as well.

Some examples:

• 901734 - Four Parameter Evaluation Method of Lateral Transient Response. I would seduce this paper with sushi and martinis if I could (and if I wasn't already engaged to MATLAB - see below). For a 20+ year old paper, I think it's gold. Domo arigato, Tetsushi sama.
  
• 2002-01-3302 - Dynamic Traction Characteristics of Tires. I have a lot of beef with some of the content of this paper, and I feel that it is generally poorly written without much of an "objective engineering" tone.
  
  In particular, I don't agree with Chuck's assessment of heat generation in tires, and that "improved turn-in" response by adding (front) roll stiffness is contradictory to "classic" (Pacejka) tire force curves. Seems to be ignoring the effect of chassis roll and time-delayed lateral load transfer on yaw response and how quickly the system settles. This is something I'll probably cover with my own thoughts on a later date. Suffice to say, my opinion is that adding roll stiffness (front or overall) moves you toward approximating a rigid body and tire-limited yaw response.
  
• 1999-01-0046 - Roll Centres and Jacking Forces in Independent Suspensions - A First Principles Explanation and a Designer's Toolkit. Pretty good, found this today. Well-written and I think describes lateral load transfer and roll centers well. Also seems to agree with my thoughts here, particularly that jacking forces only arise in a geometrically symmetric suspension when lateral tire forces are asymmetric. Pretty good feeling, makes me feel less like an idiot alone in the world!

There are several dozen other papers of varying degrees of value that I have squirreled away. If you're willing to do some data mining and look for buried gems, go to the website and start looking.