Analytical Wheel Models for Ride Dynamic Simulation of Off-road Tracked Vehicles

This paper outlines various analytical approaches of varying complexities to model the wheel in the ride dynamic formulation of off-road tracked 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 evaluation of typical high mobility tracked vehicles. The ride dynamic model used in this study describes the bounce-pitch plane motion of an armoured personnel carrier (Ml 13 APC) traversing over an arbitrary rigid terrain profile at constant speed. The ride dynamic response of the tracked vehicle is evaluated with different wheel models, and compared against field-measured ride data. The relative performance of different wheel models are assessed based on the accuracy of response prediction and associated computational time. The proposed wheel model is found to perform very well in comparison, and is equally applicable for the case of wheeled vehicles.