Simulating the Mobility of Wheeled Ground Vehicles with Mercury

Mercury is a high-fidelity, physics-based object-oriented software for conducting simulations of vehicle performance evaluations for requirements and engineering metrics. Integrating cutting-edge, massively parallel modeling techniques for soft, cohesive and dry granular soil that will integrate state-of-the-art soil simulation with high-fidelity multi-body dynamics and powertrain modeling to provide a comprehensive mobility simulator for ground vehicles. The Mercury implements the Chrono::Vehicle dynamics library for vehicle dynamics, which provides multi-body dynamic simulation of wheeled and tracked vehicles. The powertrain is modeled using the Powertrain Analysis Computational Environment (PACE), a behavior-based powertrain analysis based on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Autonomie software. Vehicle -terrain interaction (VTI) is simulated with the Ground Contact Element (GCE), which provides forces to the Chrono-vehicle solver. The driver model implements an array of tests for evaluating vehicle mobility performance. With these physics submodules, Mercury can simulate a variety of performance tests such as ride quality, maximum shock, sand slope climbing, VCI₁, acceleration tests, and many others. Additionally, the open, modular framework of Mercury makes the extension of the software to new tests and physics domains fast and easy.