APRIL 19, 2023 – U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground (YPG) is at the forefront of Army transformation efforts.
One important aspect of Army transformation involves mobility, and U.S. Army Yuma Test Center’s (YTC) approximately 200 miles of surveyed road courses are being utilized to put the next generation of vehicles through their paces.
“That work has been coming to Yuma steadily,” said Marco Nixen, Combat Systems Branch Chief. “We’ve been pretty busy in our division supporting these new priorities.”
YTC ‘s rugged conditions closely simulate what a Soldier might experience in a desert combat theater, where things like dust intrusion and intense ambient temperatures in summer can stress even the most robust combat vehicles. From paved asphalt to rugged, unimproved desert washboard, YTC’s mobility courses run the gamut of types of conditions a Soldier driving a vehicle is likely to encounter.
“The natural environment really puts these systems through stress that you don’t see in other places,” said Nixen. “Our Middle East course is a cross-country course with a lot of slope and variations with washboard conditions in places that puts a vehicle through a lot of different forces. Our hilly courses have up to about a 30% slope in places, so you are taxing transmissions and other parts of the vehicle heavily.”
Like the road courses the vehicles are tested on, a test vehicle plan can vary widely.
“It depends on what the customer wants: is it a full vehicle up system test, or just a specific component like a new cooling system or engine?” said Nixen. “We do everything from sub-systems to the whole system.”
In the case of reliability, availability, and maintainability testing, vehicles run miles of simulated missions across road courses featuring various terrain conditions. As they traverse these road courses, test vehicle operators continually verify performance of all the platform’s sophisticated electronics, as well as the vehicle’s braking, acceleration, and steering performance on slopes and steep grades, even through a fording basin and on a dust course tilled for maximum sediment.
Samples of the vehicles’ fluids are collected and analyzed at various points throughout the tests. During performance testing, the evaluators collect dozens of channels of data, including things like the displacement and temperature of each road arm on a tracked vehicle. The testers monitor if the system deteriorates through use and try to discern a trend that will help estimate the normal rate of deterioration. As it runs, the exact location and terrain conditions of any possible anomaly can be identified. In addition to the hundreds of miles of road courses, YPG has the range space to safely conduct live function fire tests of a vehicle’s weapons from both stationary and moving positions.
In recent years, this has meant hosting tests of everything from the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and the nearly-fielded Armored Multipurpose Vehicle, successor to the venerable M113 armored personnel carrier that dates back to the early 1960s, to items like the Infantry Squad Vehicle, a fast and lean four-wheel drive vehicle that carries up to a nine Soldier infantry unit and their heavy gear.
“As the Army looks at what it learned from 20 years of irregular warfare and coupled it with the previous knowledge they had when the developed the ‘big five’ weapons systems to see how they can create a solution that will support a fight against a near-peer adversary or an irregular warfare adversary,” said Jacob Obradovich, Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team Integrator. “The Army wants to be smart about it and make something modular and scalable that can be in service for decades.”
This extends to platforms such as the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, which YTC has already done testing on behalf of using surrogate vehicles to evaluate potential components of the future system.
“As we start to see more and more unmanned vehicles in the private sector, the cost is dropping drastically and the maturity is increasing,” said Obradovich. “We have a lot more data to draw from than we did even 15 or 20 years ago in the Future Combat Systems days.”
During Project Convergence 21, for instance, complex scenarios involving hundreds of Soldiers and test personnel were carried out successfully and without injury.
“The things we got to see with Project Convergence was just the tip of the iceberg,” said Obradovich. “The YPG customer service and safety mentality and our flexibility is going to be an asset to the Army and DOD because they know they can come to YPG and get the support they need to make their mission successful.”
Story by Mark Schauer
U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground