Similarity study of dust emissions from tracked military vehicles with experimental validation.

Accurate prediction of dust emissions from tracked vehicles traveling on unpaved roads is essential for environmental protection and vehicle performance maintenance. However, limited research on dust emissions from tracked vehicles with high precision results from the complex dust emission mechanism and the multitude of influencing factors of tracked vehicles. This paper presents a method for determining the dust emissions from tracked vehicles based on the similarity principle. Specifically, an experimental scheme for the scaling model of T90 tank is designed through the similarity analysis of dust emissions from tracked vehicles, which correlates the mass flow rate of dust emission with seven related variables (soil thickness, dust particle bulk density, dust average particle size, vehicle weight, track width, track landing length, and vehicle speed). The dimensionless empirical equations are obtained by multivariate nonlinear fitting of the experimental results. Furthermore, the applicability of empirical equations is validated experimentally to describe dust emissions from real tracked vehicles. The results show that the similarity principle is a better method to overcome the bottleneck of quantifying dust emissions from tracked vehicles. Meanwhile, the empirical equations derived from the scaling model are also applicable to describe the dust emissions from actual tracked military vehicles.