Performance Comparison of Solid Tires and Non-Pneumatic Tires Using Finite Element Method: Application to Military Vehicles

Abstract

Tire technologies are growing rapidly due to the high demand for applications in harsh environmental conditions. Solid and non-pneumatic (NP) tires are utilized in such conditions as transporting excessive loads, operating on rough surfaces, agriculture, construction industries and for military applications. These tires experience high stresses and excessive deformations due to sudden impacts and heavy loads. These factors are not easy to analyse experimentally due to complex experimental setups and high cost. Hence, the following study is focused on the characteristic comparisons of solid and NP tires by developing three dimensional (3D) Finite Element (FE) models under static and dynamic conditions. Initially, two FE tire models are developed for equal size of solid and NP tires. To obtain material behaviour of the tires, the suitable hyperelastic material models are required and those are selected using a curve fitting approach. Experimental data are compared with numerical results to validate the developed models. The validated models show good agreement with experimental models. The static numerical results of the validated model show that high stresses are located in the base section of the solid tire. For NP tires, spokes and shear layer bear the stresses more than the other rubber sections. Moreover, curb impact is conducted for both tires by changing tire impact velocity. Results show that, the NP tire experiences higher impact stresses than the solid tire