Company insight
Reduce vibration with composite rubber tracks
Since the late 1990s, Soucy has been making composite rubber tracks (CRTs) for vehicles in the defence industries, which reduce vibration levels in armoured vehicles compared with traditional tracks.
T
he vibration level in armoured vehicles can have a huge effect on human health, crew fatigue and
system reliability. With modern vehicles producing increasingly higher vibration levels due to faster speeds and lighter frames – among other factors – reducing vibration is vital to ensure that the crew is both safe and efficient. Soucy, as a leading supplier of composite rubber track (CRT), is very aware of the importance of reducing vibration and noise within a platform. Recent years has seen increasing scrutiny placed over vibration levels of armoured vehicles – due in part to high-profile cases such as the UK MOD’s Ajax programme, but also as a result of many Cold War-era vehicles finally going out of service. Back then, notes Kevin Sloan, business development director, Europe & APAC at Soucy, vehicle designers were less aware of the dangers vibration poses.
a white paper that examines the current standards used to measure vibrational levels. Part of the problem with the current way the industry treats vibrations, according to Ciaran O’Shea, CEO of NPrime, is the overreliance of modern design and development on virtual modelling, with prototypes rarely reacting the way in which modelling expects when put under rigorous testing.
As vibration can affect many aspects of an operation, it’s important that testing procedures provide accurate results in order to empower decision makers to make the right choices. For example, ordinance, munitions and explosives (OME) are certified in accordance with a standard called 0035, which dictates the vibrational levels at which OMEs can be transported at. Many vehicles with traditional tracks fall outside of these levels, O’Shea explains, but CRTs have been shown to bring these levels down to within the 0035 standard.
“Things are modernising – vehicles are getting lighter, tracks are getting lighter, suspensions are getting more dynamic. And that means that everything inside the vehicle is getting shaken in different ways.”
Kevin Sloan, business development director, Europe & APAC at Soucy
“Vehicles weren’t moving at the sort of speeds and trafficability that they are today,” says Sloan. “Things are modernising – vehicles are getting lighter, tracks are getting lighter, suspensions are getting more dynamic. And that means that everything inside the vehicle is getting shaken in different ways.”
Vibration’s operational impact Looking into some of the issues that have arisen as a result of this modernisation, Soucy has worked with NPrime, an engineering consultancy group, to produce
Similarly, Sloan cites the experiences of British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, where considerable amounts of ammunition were deemed unusable and destroyed as a result of the vibration levels in the turret stocks of the vehicles they were carried in. “When those microscopic vibrations hit the ammunition, it compacts with the rounds themselves – the munitions powders,” he explains. “And what happens then is they’re not flying true, which means you’re going to miss your target and waste ammunition.” When the ammunition impacted by these vibrations extends to handheld missiles
Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
worth tens of thousands of pounds, this can be a serious problem.
Whole-body vibration standards However, “Is the method of assessing Human Exposure to Whole Body Vibration Fit for Purpose?” – the white paper from NPrime and Soucy – examines a different problem. After testing vibration levels using steel track and CRTs on the same vehicles with identical setups – even down to the same driver – “it became very apparent to us that the modern analysis techniques that are used for identifying the vibration, and the human exposure to vibration, is not fit for purpose,” says O’Shea.
The main issue relates to how whole- body vibration is assessed by current standards – specifically, that they operate under the understanding that the human body is not affected by vibrations over 80Hz. However, from Soucy and NPrime’s studies, they have received many reports of nausea from personnel testing armoured vehicles at these levels using traditional tracks. The same tests using CRTs have seen a reduction in vibration of up to 40%, O’Shea notes, resulting in a substantial decrease in nausea reporting and thereby increasing operational effectiveness. For this reason, Sloan and O’Shea believe the current standards for whole- body vibration need to be revisited. Otherwise, Sloan notes, the defence industry risks pushing this discussion “into the next century and beyond, which is actually hurting our soldiers – but also costing lots of money in order to change later, when it's too late”. ●
For more information on vibration levels and issues with the current measurement system, consult the white paper on the Soucy website.
www.soucy-defense.com 17
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