Abstract
Although many physics-based off-road mobility simulation models are proposed and utilized for vehicle performance evaluation as well as for understanding of tire-soil interaction problems, full vehicle simulation on deformable terrain requires addressing the computational complexity associated with the large dimensional physics-based terrain dynamics models for practical use. This paper, therefore, presents a hierarchical multiscale tire-soil interaction model that is fully integrated into parallelized off-road mobility simulation framework. In particular, a co-simulation procedure is developed for full vehicle simulation with multiscale terrain dynamics models by exploiting the moving soil patch technique. To this end, a detailed off-road vehicle simulation model is divided into five subsystems: a multibody vehicle subsystem and four tire-soil subsystems composed of nonlinear FE tires and multiscale moving soil patches. The tire-soil subsystems are interfaced with the vehicle subsystem by MPI through force-displacement coupling. It is demonstrated that the proposed framework allows for alleviating computational intensity of a full vehicle simulation that involves complex hierarchical multiscale terrain dynamics models by effectively distributing computational loads with co-simulation techniques.