Effects of inflation pressure and load on tire deformation and tire/terraincontact area in off-road vehicle

The compaction and stress generation on terrain, werealways investigated based on empirical approaches ortesting methods for tire/terrain interaction. However, theanalysis should be performed for various tires and atdifferent soil strengths. With the increasing capacity ofnumerical computers and simulation software, finiteelement modeling of tire/terrain interaction seems agood approach for prediction of effect of change in theparameters. In this study, an elaborated 3D model fullycompliant with the geometry of radial tire 115/60R13 isworked up, using commercial code SolidworkSimulation. The hyper-elastic and incompressiblerubber as tire main material is analyzed by Moony-Rivlin model. The Drucker-Prager yield criterion is usedto model the soil compaction. Results show that themodel realistically predicts the laboratory tests outputsof the modeled tire on the soft soil

Keywords:

tire/soil interaction , finite element method(FEM) , soil compaction , stress distribution , inflationpressure