HIGH-RESOLUTION SOIL VEHICLE INTERACTION MODELING

In the development of a virtual proving ground for evaluating performa nce of off-road vehicles, the interaction between soil and the vehicle system must be accurately modeled, Typically the soil/vehicle interfa ce can involve large discontinuous deformations of the soil mass, This paper presents a soil model using the Discrete Element Method (DEM) t o model the soil. The advantage of the DEM is that slip planes and sep arations can form within the soil mass, thus capturing evolving failur e mechanisms in a simpler and more realistic way than models based on a continuum description of the soil. The predominant disadvantage of D EM in soil simulations is its enormous computational requirement. A di scussion is provided on the use of High Performance Computing (HPC) sy stems, both scalar and parallel, to solve meaningful soil-vehicle inte rface problems. A comparison of simulation and experimental results is presented for a soil plowing experiment.