Compound mechanism modeling of wheel loader front-end kinematics for advance engineering simulation

Compound closed-loop mechanism methodology is proposed to model the wheel loader front-end kinematics for simulating the mechanism motion in a dynamic environment. For the numerical modeling purpose, the mechanism is considered as consisting of three vector loops connected by the joint angles or displacements. Each vector loop is formulated as time-dependent ordinary differential equations (ODEs). The simulations cover the numerical solutions of the forward and reverse kinematics differential equations. The consistency error check approach is employed to validate the simulation. A case study is presented to demonstrate the reverse kinematics simulation of the compound mechanism model in Simulink environment, which includes the user-defined program, numerical solution, and error analysis. The displacement-time variations of two driving cylinders are obtained with the inputs of the lift and rotation bucket accelerations. The simulation is validated with the numerical analysis of the error results. This research provides a significant method to simulate the wheel loader motion for wide-ranging engineering application.