Tracked Vehicle Dynamics Modeling and Simulation Methodology, with Control, using RecurDyn Software Package

Many Army vehicles require tracks in order to meet the tough mobility requirements for the Army mission profile. Modeling and Simulation MS provides a large cost-savings and offers a quick turn-around when addressing vehicle performance issues. Once a baseline model is built for a given system, the model can be changed quickly to address different load or usage profiles and to determine the overall affect on the vehicle and its performance. Tracked vehicles present a number of challenges, however, due to the large number of interactions between all the track and suspension components. Prior methods for analyzing tracked vehicle performance through MS led to either simplified vehicle models or very long compute times due to the level of detail required to properly model tracked vehicles.