• Journal of KSNVE
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.1259-1266
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• 1999

The objective of this investigation is to develop a compliant track link model and apply this model to the multi-body dynamic analysis of high mobility tracked vehicles. Two major difficulties encountered in developing the compliant track models. The first one is that the integration step size must be kept small in order to maintain the numerical stability of the solution. This solution deals with high oscillatory signals resulting from the impulsive contact forces and stiff compliant elements to represent the joints between the track links. The second difficulty is due to the large number of the system equations of motion of the three dimensional multibody tracked vehicle model. This problem was sloved by decoupling the equations of motion of the chassis subsystem and the track subsystems. Recursive methods are used to obtain a minimum set of equations for the chassis subsystem. Several simulation scenarios were tested for the high mobility tracked vehicle including accelaeration, high speed cruising, braking, and turning motion in order to demonstrate the effectiveness and validity of the methods proposed in this investigation.