ANALYTICAL WHEEL MODELS FOR RIDE DYNAMIC SIMULATION OF OFF-ROAD TRACKED VEHICLES

This paper outlines various analytical approaches of varying complexit ies to model the wheel in the ride dynamic formulation of off-road tra cked vehicles. In addition to a proposed model, four analytical models available in the literature are compared to study their effectiveness in modeling the wheel/track-terrain interaction for ride dynamic eval uation of typical high mobility tracked vehicles. The ride dynamic mod el used in this study describes the bounce-pitch plane motion of an ar moured personnel carrier (M113 APC) traversing over an arbitrary rigid terrain profile at constant speed, The ride dynamic response of the t racked vehicle is evaluated with different wheel models, and compared against field-measured ride data. The relative performance of differen t wheel models are assessed based on the accuracy of response predicti on and associated computational time. The proposed wheel model is foun d to perform very well in comparison, and is equally applicable for th e case of wheeled vehicles.