Robust Design Optimization of a Tracked Vehicle System

This study presents the robust optimization for the dynamic responses of a heavy military tracked vehicle system. In this study, the tracked vehicle model has 954 degrees-of-freedom, which consists 189 bodies in total; 37 bodies for the chassis such as sprocket, road wheel, road arm, etc., 76 track link bodies for each track subsystem, 36 revolute joints and 152 bushing elements. The design objective is to minimize the maximum vertical acceleration of hull and its’ variance and satisfy the wheel travel constraints for torsion bars and the hydro-pneumatic suspension units within ±1σ ranges. In order to avoid the difficulty of design sensitivity analysis and overcome the numerical noise, a meta-model based optimization is employed. In this approach, first, the space filling methods and the classical DOE methods are used to generate sampling points. Second, the meta-models are constructed from the Kriging, RBF and RSM methods. Finally, a well-developed numerical optimizer sequentially solves the approximate optimization problem. In the numerical test, the robust optimization of the tracked vehicle system, having 11-random design variables, is solved in only 26 analyses.