Stationary response of a military tracked vehicle

In this paper, stationary response of a '2+N' (9) degree of freedom (dof) tracked vehicle model fitted with conventional torsion bar suspension system is investigated for ground excitations resulting from rough off-road terrain operations. The vehicle is assumed to be moving with constant velocity on a randomly profiled terrain which is modeled as a homogeneous random process, being the output of a linear first order shaping filter to white noise. The equivalent road wheel stiffness is computed taking into account the stiffness due to track pad and the spring rate due to track tension. The investigations are carried out considering different randomness of terrain profile and also different stiffness values for the suspension system. The comparison of hull bounce acceleration and hull pitch acceleration is made for different configurations of suspension system.