Handling Analysis of Tracked and Wheeled Military Vehicles

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to create a simulation environment that can model non-linear dynamics of tracked vehicles and wheeled vehicles including track-ground and tire-ground relations. Firstly, three different tracked vehicles and two different wheeled vehicles have been modelled in MATLAB SIMULINK environment. The tracked vehicles are six, eight and ten road wheel vehicles, while wheeled vehicles are Ackermann steered and skid steered 6x6 wheeled vehicles. The dynamic models of tracked and wheeled vehicles differentiate in terms only tire and track; all the parameters of the hulls of the vehicles are the same. For traction force calculation, the flexible pad formula has been used for tracked vehicles and has been adopted to wheeled vehicles. Also, stability definitions that are available in the literature for linear and simple vehicle models have been implemented for all vehicles and, the transitions between neutral steer to understeer or neutral steer to oversteer behaviors have been represented for created non-linear vehicle models. After the analysis it has been concluded that, for tracked vehicles, as the number of the road wheels increases the agility of the vehicle increases. Moreover, with this thesis parameter set, skid steering vehicles show oversteering behaviors whereas Ackermann steering vehicle shows understeering behaviors. In addition to these, adopted flexible pad formula for wheeled vehicles performs coherent responses with the literature and reveals expected results.