Soldiers, pilots and commanders in action do not have time to worry about getting stuck in unstable ground. During military operations, military personnel must be able to land planes and travel in vehicles on any kind of terrain. When a plane lands or a mine-removing plow drives over uneven terrain, the tires can cause major deformations in the soil and vegetation.
Soil deforms like a solid or flows like a fluid depending on the conditions of the terrain.
This leads to a variety of issues for researchers modeling vehicles and their interaction with the soil. To date, there is not a comprehensive model that takes all the varied soil flow issues into account. Researchers at the ERDC have been working to improve modeling associated with mobility for the past five years, but there are two major problems with existing simulation technology. First, large deformation in soils is poorly understood, and models designed for other engineering materials are not applicable to soils. Second, numerical methods based on finite difference or finite element techniques do not capture discontinuous soil deformation.