Surface Contamination Simulation for a Military Ground Vehicle

Vehicle surface contamination can degrade not only soldier vision but also the effectiveness of camera and sensor systems mounted externally on the vehicle for autonomy and situational awareness. In order to control vehicle surface contamination, a better understanding of dust particle generation, transport and accumulation is necessary. The focus of the present work is simulation of vehicle surface contamination on the rear part of the vehicle due to the interaction of the combat vehicle track with the ground and dust in the surrounding ambient atmosphere. A notional tracked military vehicle is used for the Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. A CFD methodology with one-way-coupled Lagrangian particle modeling is used. The simulation is initially run with only air flow to solve the air pressure, velocity, and turbulence quantities in a steady state condition. The steady state solution values are used to initialize particle advection analysis for the dust particles to transport in the atmosphere and accumulate on the exterior surface of the vehicle. The findings from study done to date using the aforementioned method for engineering purposes that requires quick turnaround time and shortcomings, challenges with this method are also presented in this paper.