Study on Contact Characteristics Between Supporting Wheel System‐Track Plate and Soil Internal Stress Transmissibility

Abstract

ABSTRACT To study the stress transfer among multiple road wheels, track shoes, and soil during tracked vehicle travel on soft terrain, this paper proposes a three‐layer coupled stress transfer model based on Hertz contact theory. This model brings the road‐wheel system, track shoes, and soil into a unified framework. We build a simulation platform for the “Smart Crawler No. 1” vehicle on sandy soil by combining rigid–flexible multibody dynamics with finite element methods. The platform allows us to examine how contact stresses at each road wheel change with travel speed and how stress distributes within the soil. We verify the model using field experiments. The results show that the first and last road wheels have higher stress and wider stress spread than the other wheels. The contact stress at the third road wheel changes most with speed. The contact elements mainly experience compressive stress in the Y direction, with clear alternating tension–compression behavior. In the soil under the track shoes, vertical and horizontal stresses are highly uneven. After each wheel passes, stress peaks appear at various depths, and these peaks occur later as depth increases. Moreover, travel speed has a much stronger effect on vertical stress than on horizontal stress.