Abstract:
Off-road vehicle trafficking
is of interesting subjects for agricultural,
mining and civil engineering purposes. The
traversing over snowy and wet terrain is of
greater importance regarding the sinkage
and terrain properties. The motion
resistance, traction, sinkage, and vehicle
stability are functions of wheel-terrain
interactions and particularly the contact
patch characteristics. As adoption of
wheeled vehicles on snowy terrain is
difficult, tracked wheel vehicles are of
greater interest and applicability. In this
paper, the designing and analysis of tracked
wheel system mounted on a light weight allterrain
vehicle (ATV) is addressed. The
designing considerations are based on semiempirical
models (Bekker and Mohr-
Coulomb criterion) and experimentally
obtained data on the snow mechanical
properties for the test region. Based on the
analysis, it is observed that the greatest
value of total deformation for the front and
rear chasses are obtained at 0.00028485 and
0.00026229 m, respectively. The von Mises
yield criterion addresses that the yielding of
materials starts when the second deviatoric
stress invariant gets to a critical value close
to failure. Furthermore, the greatest values
of von Mises stress for the front and rear
tracked wheel chassis are equal to 64.60 and
62.48 MPa, respectively. The similarity is
that the critical point is situated at the
coincidence point between the inclined and
longitudinally oriented rods (joint point). It
is concluded that the developed vehicle
could serve as a functional vehicle to
perform on different off-road operational
condition particularly wet terrains.
