Vibration analysis and optimal design of tracked vehicle's seat suspension for improving combat efficiency

The tracked vehicle (TV) primarily operates on poor road surfaces, which means the vibration excitation of the road surface significantly impacts the driver's sighting efficiency and driving comfort. This is the cause of reduced vehicle combat efficiency. To address this, based on the dynamic interaction model between the TV, Seat, and Driver established in Matlab/Simulink software, all the dynamic parameters of the suspension system of the TV and seat are then simulated under different operation conditions of the TV. The sighting efficiency and driving comfort of the driver evaluated via the root mean square of the relative displacement between the TV's body and driver (z_w), and the driver's head acceleration in the vertical direction are chosen as two evaluation indexes. The results indicate that the operating conditions as well as the dynamic parameters of the TV greatly influence the sighting efficiency and driving comfort of the driver. By using the seat's new suspension added by optimized NSS (negative stiffness structure), both z_w and a_wz1 are strongly reduced in comparison with the seat's old suspension, especially, z_w and a_wz1 are remarkably reduced by 63% and 62% compared to the seat's old suspension when the TV is moving on ISO-E class road surface at 60 km/h. Therefore, the seat's new suspension greatly improves the sighting efficiency and driving comfort of the driver. In addition, the addition of NSS to the TV's seat suspension is completely feasible in the actual condition of the TV. This is a very practical study to improve the TV's combat efficiency.