Modelling Techniques and Simulation of the Canadian Jeep Iltis Using Multibody Systems (MBS)

The work described in this paper performs the modelling and simulation of a Canadian Jeep named Iltis using Multibody Systems modelling techniques. This vehicle is of military use in Canada and the data was provided by Prof. R.J. Anderson as part of the IAVSD road vehicle benchmarks.

The equations of motion were obtained using the MBS equation generator SD/FAST. The simulation was performed with the general purpose simulation program ACSL. Analysis and pre and post processing was carried out with the matrix analysis package MATLAB.

The paper discusses aspects related to computational performance of the equation generator and the simulation code. It also discusses vehicle behaviour as it performs various maneuvres. Quantities presented are equation complexity and cpu usage for the equation generation phase. Runtime is used to characterise simulation code performance. Concerning vehicle behaviour, static equilibrium, eigenvalue and eigenvector analysis, stochastic ride quality, large vertical disturbances and handling performance are all executed in order to assess the capabilities of the packages to perform a wide variety of simulations.

Finally the work discusses the amount of work involved in carrying out such a study with the aforementioned computational tools.