Optimum Positioning of Tank Mountings in a Fixed Tank Vehicle

This paper aims at optimizing some critical characteristics of a fixed-tank biaxial vehicle, with respect to the lateral performance of the installed tank. For the description of the fixed-tank vehicle, a linear half car model with six degrees of freedom is implemented, subject to many types of road irregularities. The relative position of the tank mountings, with respect to the vehicle frame, as well as their corresponding stiffness and damping characteristics are optimized, such that the maximum values of vertical and rotational acceleration of the tank are minimized, under the geometrical constraints of the vehicle. For the optimization tasks, the BFGS quasi-Newton and the (μ+λ)-Evolution Strategy methods have been implemented. The former outperforms conventional Newton’s methods, due to the secant approximation of the Hessian, while the latter has been shown to perform better in many engineering applications, compared to other categories of EA.