Customer Reviews

Theory of Ground Vehicles, 3rd Edition

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The book covers dynamics of ground vehicles over hard surfaces and unprepared terrain - mechanics of vehicle-terrain interactions, terramechanics. Tracked vehicles such as a military tank or a bulldozer that is propelled by tracks instead of pneumatic tires are also covered in detail in this book. There is also attention to air-cushion vehicles (hovercrafts). However, the guided ground vehicles which are constrained to move along a fixed path, such as railway vehicles and tracked levitated vehicles are not covered in this book.

There is a very good chapter on the mechanics of pneumatic tires, which has both theoretical and practical information. Attention is also given to performance of tires on wet surfaces. This issue is frequently overlooked by the other vehicle dynamics books; however, the behavior of tires on wet surfaces is of considerable interest from a safety point of view, as many accidents occur on slippery roads. The tire is also analyzed as both spring and a damper. There are useful graphs and tables in this chapter, as well as throughout the whole book. The table of damping coefficient of tires shows that the damping coefficient of tire drops with increase of the inflation pressure.

Mechanics of vehicle-terrain interactions studies distribution of stresses in the terrain under vehicular loads, empirical methods for predicting off-road vehicle performance, a computer-aided method for evaluating the performance of vehicles with flexible tracks, and so on.

Performance characteristics are covered separately for road and off-road vehicles. For the road vehicles, the author analyzes equation of motion and maximum tractive effort, aerodynamic forces and moments, vehicle power plant and transmission characteristics, prediction of vehicle performance, operating fuel economy, engine and transmission matching and braking performance. For off-road vehicles, the author examines drawbar performance, fuel economy of cross-country operations, transport productivity and efficiency, mobility map and mobility profile, selection of vehicle configurations for off-road operations.

Handling characteristics of road vehicles and steering of tracked vehicles are also separately analyzed.

There is a very good chapter on vehicle ride characteristics and human response to vibration.

I also recommend "Race Car Vehicle Dynamics" by William F. Milliken and Douglas L. Milliken, which is also a good compromise between theoretical and practical information.

This is a good book. It is not all inclusive however and is semi-technical with not very many workout problems.

Theory of Ground Vehicles by J.Y. Wong (4th edition) is an excellent resource for automotive engineers. There are so many plots, visuals and other useful resources that it is almost overwhelming. However, if you know a specific topic you are interested in learning about this vast wealth of information proves extremely useful. I have only been focusing on the performance of road vehicles chapters in the book so I haven't had a chance to look at other sections in detail. However, there is significant discussion about off-road vehicles as well.

It covers various types of ground vehicles and the authors has done a tremendus job to produce such a good book especially on engineering point of view. Well and easy understanding for Engineers with lots of mathematically formulaes and explainations.

It worth to read over and over again.

A book for reference if involving ground vehicle dynamic computations.

I recommend every automotive engineer to use this book, It's a good reference.

It is a present for my boyfriend. I was able to find it easily on the site and it arrived quickly after I made the purchase.