Vehicle mobility on highly organic soils

Abstract

Current political climates have generated a renewed interest in the northern regions of the world. These areas are known to have soft marshy peat, highly organic soils, and cold harsh winter climates. Currently vehicle mobility modeling capability on this terrain is limited and existing studies do not include current military vehicles. This work presents mobility experiments of current military vehicles at multiple field sites containing peat or highly organic soils that can eventually be used to improve mobility modeling on these soils. Field work is being conducted during multiple seasons including winter, spring, and summer. The vehicle traction, motion resistance, and hard surface rolling resistance of an instrumented High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) and a Small Unit Support Vehicle (SUSV) were examined. The first is a common multipurpose vehicle and the second is a vehicle designed to operate in these types of environments. Preliminary analysis of the field test results will be discussed in this paper.

Improving winter traction for vehicles in northern operations

“…Current cold regions mobility models were based on vehicle testing from the 1990s to capture the behavior on snow and ice, freezing and thawing ground [11,12,13]. We have recently begun work to upgrade and validate these models for modern and over-snow vehicles, more accurately distribute the seasonal terrain properties and mobility predictions within a geospatial framework, and to include the highly organic peat and muskeg terrains of the far north [14,15,16].…”