A study on analyzing the influence of deformable and rigid grounds on the comfortable level of the construction vehicle

The deformable ground could affect the construction vehicle’s comfortable level and working efficiency. To clarify this question, under the interaction between the construction vehicle’s wheel and deformable ground, a three-dimensional nonlinear vehicle model is built to calculate the vibration equations and simulate the vehicle model under various operation conditions. Two indexes of the acceleration responses in the time region and the acceleration-frequency in the frequency region of the seat’s heave, the cab’s pitch, and the cab’s roll angle are used to evaluate the comfortable level. The research shows that the deformable ground greatly affects the vehicle’s comfortable level and driver’s health under different operation conditions. Especially, the soil ground strongly affects the driver’s comfortable level whereas the sand ground remarkably affects the cab’s shaking. Besides, when the construction vehicle is traveling under poor soil ground, the vehicle’s resonance frequencies appear more than when the vehicle is traveling under a rigid road of ISO C-class, particularly at the excitation frequencies from 1.4 Hz to 7.8 Hz. Therefore, the deformable ground greatly affects the driver’s health at these low excitation frequencies.