MODELING TIRE-SOIL INTERACTION USING FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS AND SMOOTH PARTICLE HYDRODYNAMICS

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Computerized modeling has greatly changed both the design process and the way in which experimental information is gathered. Traditional design and development processes involved formulations of physical models with various simplifying assumptions and, in some cases, these models could not be effectively employed for prototyping and experimental evaluations. The continuous setup, running, and information gathering of these processes could quickly become very expensive. With the advent of computerized modeling, a wide range of virtual experiments could be performed in less time and at substantially lower cost than those based on the physical models. Furthermore, the virtual models could be far more realistic of the physical systems and could provide more accurate estimations of the system dynamic performance.  The longterm objective of the proposed research is to develop effective virtual models of pneumatic tires and their interactions with rigid as well as deformable terrain surfaces. With the advancements in the computerized modeling methods, it has become feasible to develop comprehensive pneumatic tire models, which could permit the determination of its various properties including the tire-road interaction parameters, which are either prohibitively expensive to measure or nearly impossible from the physical models. The virtual tire models could thus serve as important and efficient tools for designs of advance tires with enhanced dynamic performance of the vehicles including the fuel efficiency, mobility, directional dynamics and thereby the safety of the vehicle and the driver. The modeling of tire interactions with soft soils continues to be the greatest challenge for realizing improved designs for resource sectors and military vehicles tires. Although a few recent works have provided an array of new parameters describing the tire interactions with soft soils, their effectiveness is not yet proven mostly due to lack of accurate soil constitutive equations. These studies generally employ Finite Element models of the soil, where the material models requiring extensive calibrations and validation.  The proposed study will aim at developments of virtual tire models that could be applied to on-road and off-road commercial vehicles involving non-deformable and deformable terrain surfaces. The accuracy and efficiency of the model will be emphasized to facilitate applications towards designs of high performance tires particularly for high-speed and high load capacity resource sector vehicles operating on deformable terrains. For this purpose, the meshless modeling method of Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) would be explored for more accurately simulations of large soil deformations and complex tire-soil interactions.