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- Forces balance out
- The LCA provides no restorative moment (worst-case, actual depends on attachment)
- The UCA only resists forces in the X-Z plane
- The UCA-upright node is free to move vertically (actually constrained to an arc)
- The moment of the upright about the Y-axis is handled by the steering system.
- The UCA-upright node does not travel more than 30mm in the Y from its clevis (currently about 25mm with a coilover compression of 40mm)
This means that for analysis purposes, we can treat it as exactly horizontal. This causes no more than 0.5% of error in this analysis.
Assuming no restorative moment, the moments at the LCA-upright node must cancel out. If we take a look at the upright, we can see that the contact patch is roughly 130mm from the LCA node, and the UCA node is roughly 450mm from the LCA node.this is a distance ratio of 1:3.46. We can safely approximate this as 1:3. We then have the system.
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