A novel forestry chassis with an articulated body with 3 degreesof freedom and installed luffingwheel-legs

One of the challenging problems in the forest industry is to develop a chassis that is well-adapted to the complex terrain conditions in the forest. In this article, a novel forestry chassis with an articulated body with 3 degrees of freedom and installed luffing wheel-legs (FC-3DOF&LW) is proposed, and the mechanical model of the luffing wheel-leg is built. Based on the mechanical model, the hydraulic cylinder velocity that involves the wheel-leg luffing is calculated. The process of surmounting the obstacle is presented by multi-body dynamics simulation. To demonstrate the improvement of ride comfort, the other simulation of the chassis with an articulated body with 3 degrees of freedom (FC-3DOF) is contrasted in multi-dynamics software. The final result shows that curves of barycenter displacement for FC-3DOF&LW with the front and rear frames are well matched when the front frame surmounts the obstacle; in particular, the barycenter displacement is almost stable when the rear frame surmounts the obstacle. The maximum rotated angle of the articulated joint reaches almost 37° without the luffing wheel-leg, whereas it is only 4° with FC-3DOF&LW, a decrease of 89.1%. Moreover, the acceleration trend for FC-3DOF&LW is more stable than that for FC-3DOF.