Toyota on Trampoline

Last crawled date: 1 year, 10 months ago

This is a dynamic simulation made with Autodesk Inventor 2014. You can see the flight of my own Toyota Corolla Hatchback (which I drive all day long throughout Bucharest, Romania) from the trampoline to the landing deck. I always asked myself how big should be a trampoline to accommodate such a flight for my car.

The „assembly” is made of only three parts: the car, the trampoline and the landing deck.

The model for the car was made using the data in the „Toyota Weights and Dimensions.jpg” picture. The overall dimensions are OK, the material is steel, but the question is: how can I respect the mass of 1350 kg (which includes fuel and a person inside) together with this conditions? Well, the answer is simple: the model created by me is a pure shell with an only 7 mm thick hull.

This flight is just like any other flight: very sensitive to any parameter changing. After a long adjustment of the parameters I had obtained the solution in the movie. The picture „Shapes and Dimensions.jpg” shows the results, and the picture „Flight Data.jpg” emphasizes what are the magnitudes of the velocities and accelerations at the first landing contact.

The only loss of accuracy is due to the motor of this motion. So, beside the gravity force, there is a force equivalent of 2 tons-mass which is placed in the front of the car as a car towing force. You can see the vector in the picture „Flight Data.jpg”. My solution ignores any friction, but I have no control of how long the force acts. Actually, the force acts all the time, that is it acts also after the car leave the trampoline (!), which is not correct at all. A proper solution should be to make real wheels (which rotates) to control the speed of rotation, accordingly with the intended speed of the car. You can make this to obtain a more accurate simulation. Whatever, the situation is same: you have to fine adjust the flight parameters to obtain a similar landing of the car.

Taking account of the loss of accuracy you understand that the take-off speed of 110 km/h mentioned in the picture is not correct, since the speed is increasing from the moment of take-off, due to the permanent force of 2 tons. The increasing of speed is visible in the picture „Flight Data.jpg”. You can see that the landing speed is around 50 m/s = 180 km/h. Anyway, the flight is OK in respect of the characteristics presented.

Having all the data at your disposition, you can change any setting to see what happens with the flight. Surprises are very funny... You can change the shapes of the trampoline and the landing deck to obtain a longer flight. For instance you can change the angle from 10° to any other (reasonable) value.

You have to download all the files in a directory, then open the .iam file with Inventor 2014, 2015..., enter Environments/Dynamic Simulation and click on Play button. Instead of 4900 images you can use 490 images if you have to wait too much for the simulation. If the contact between the car wheels and trampoline is not good, finish the Dynamic Simulation and unsuppress the two tangent constraints from the object Toyota Corolla 1350 kg. Then suppress them again, and go back to simulation.

Enjoy!