Vehicle vibrating on a soft compacting soil half-space: Ground vibrations, terrain damage, and vehicle vibrations

The point of departure of the present work may be either an interest in vehicle vibrations themselves, or in ground vibrations and terrain damage due to vehicles traveling off-road. The vibrations of a vehicle traversing dry, soft terrain, which is either rough or undulating, may be significantly modified by the dynamic interaction of the vehicle with the soil, particularly due to losses of energy by soil compaction and as elastic waves. The present work provides a prediction methodology for both vehicle and soil vibrations, accounting for the effects mentioned above. An expedient linear method is compared to a rheologically-based non-linear method. In the linear method, the soil compaction is incorporated as a loss factor in the dynamic stiffness of the otherwise elastic half-space; the imaginary part of that dynamic stiffness already includes the effects of wave damping. The non-linear model treats the compaction using a general rheological model for soils exhibiting both viscous and thixotropic effects, and requires iterative solution. A key feature of the latter model is the hypothesis that the stress distribution may be approximately regarded as quasi-static when calculating compaction losses; that approximation is expected to hold at low frequencies, since the P-wavelength in the soil is then much greater than the dimensions of the zone in which most compaction occurs. The methods predict that the soil compaction and excited ground vibrations have maxima at the vehicle bounce and hop resonances, and at high frequencies at which the Rayleigh wavelength approaches the order of the contact patch diameter. Moreover, sufficiently soft, compactable soils, but fully realizable in nature, control the vehicle response at the hop resonance, and possibly also at the bounce resonance.