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Michael Parker, Clifford Witte, Susan Frankenstein, and Allan Wheeler
Mobility in the Arctic involves more than operating on only snow and ice surfaces. Vehicles must be able to navigate the during the summer, fall and spring which include both frozen and unfrozen soil surfaces and the transition periods where the ground is freezing in the fall and thawing in the spring. Each of these ground states present a unique challenge to vehicle mobility and must be studied to see fully understand the impacts on mobility. They either get covered by a blanket of snow which insulates the surface slowing and sometimes preventing freezing, or the experimenting team arrives to the test site a day late finding the surface already completely thawed. To solve this problem U.S. Army Corps of Engineers researchers have constructed three frost susceptible soil surfaces for full scale vehicle testing at the Cold Regions Research Laboratory in Hanover, NH. Inside its Frost Effects Research Facility, CRREL researchers may freeze and thaw the soil as needed without relying on the difficult timing of mother nature. The facility allows the user to directly control the freeze and thaw cycles allowing multiple vehicles to be tested on different surfaces over the course of a single winter. This speeds up the research on frost susceptible soils during these difficult transition periods and provides much needed mobility data for predictive modeling and planning purposes. Multiple soil conditions and freeze thaw states have already been studied and this paper will discuss the results for light tracked and wheeled vehicles.
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