IMPROVEMENT OF AN INDOOR TRACTION MEASUREMENT SYSTEM BASED ON A FORCED SLIP MECHANISM

摘要

Our formerly-built indoor single wheel testing system that could measure precise tractive performance of agricultural tires was redesigned and modified. This new system aims to obtain an accurate tractive performance of off-roadl tires, to compare experimental results of tire traction with those of computer simulation of tire performance under developing. The system consists of a soil bin, the mixing and compaction device (MCD) and the single wheel tester (SWT) with forced slip mechanism. In the tire performance measurement, the soil is mixed and compacted by the MCD before each experiment to obtain an initial uniform soil condition. The SWT consists of driving unit of a tire and the carriage of the driving unit. In the current system with forced slip mechanism, a target tire and the carriage of the SWT are driven by separate AC motors respectively, and the relative velocity difference of tire rotation and carriage translation will decide the slip condition in the experiment. It was verified that the range of available slip could exceed our former indoor traction measurement system with traction load-based slip mechanism. Using the improved system, four off-road tires of different tread patterns were tested to obtain their traction performance on sand.