EFFECT OF TREAD PATTERN ON TRACTION PERFORMANCE OF OFF-ROAD TIRES ANALYZED BY FE-DEM

摘要

Soil-tire system interaction is one of the fundamental and important research topics in terramechanics. Thus far there had been many attempts on performance prediction of off-road tires using theoretical, experimental, or semi-empirical approaches. However, with recent development of information technologies, computational approach has become the most popular method in various available methods. We have already been applying a 2D dynamic FE-DEM, where FEM for tire and for bottom soil layer and DEM for surface soil layer are coupled together and satisfactory results on a tire performance analysis using FE-DEM have already been achieved. In this paper, the traction performance of real tires with two different tread patterns –smooth and grooved– was done by applying FE-DEM and we also compared the numerical result with the experimental results obtained using our newly developed indoor traction measurement system to check the validity of proposed FE-DEM for soil-tire interaction analysis. It became clear that the computational results had sufficient accuracy in analysis of tire traction performance for different tread patterns.