Development of a Special Purpose Computer Program for Dynamic Analysis of Track Vehicles

In this paper the procedure for the development of a special purpose computer program for dynamic analysis of track vehicles is presented. To obtain the minimum number of generalized coordinates of a system, relative joint coordinates are adopted. The equations of motion are then derived in terms of relative joint coordinates through the use of Lagrangian formulation. Values of relative joint coordinates are transformed into those of Cartesian coordinates after efficient numerical integration due to the minimum number of generalized coordinates of the system. A computer program based on the algorithm is developed and it is demonstrated that computation time is substantially reduced without loss of accuracy.