In the development of a virtual proving ground for evaluating performance of off-road vehicles, the interaction between soil and the vehicle system must be accurately modeled, Typically the soil/vehicle interface can involve large discontinuous deformations of the soil mass, This paper presents a soil model using the Discrete Element Method (DEM) to model the soil. The advantage of the DEM is that slip planes and separations can form within the soil mass, thus capturing evolving failure mechanisms in a simpler and more realistic way than models based on a continuum description of the soil. The predominant disadvantage of DEM in soil simulations is its enormous computational requirement. A discussion is provided on the use of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems, both scalar and parallel, to solve meaningful soil-vehicle interface problems. A comparison of simulation and experimental results is presented for a soil plowing experiment. [References: 14]
展开▼
