Investigation of design and performance improvements on solid resilient tires through numerical simulation

Abstract

Abstract Solid tires are often utilized to bear excessive loads. Therefore, sidewall cracks and internal heat build-up affect their durability more significantly. It is a challenge to minimize these factors and improve tire performance while maintaining the functionality of the solid tire. Moreover, there are no specific standard guidelines for modifying the solid tire design to achieve this objective. This study proposes several design and performance improvements to the solid resilient tire and investigates the performance of these modified designs using the Finite Element (FE) method under static and dynamic conditions. For these FE simulations, suitable hyperelastic models are obtained using curve fitting combined with three standard error measures. The results show that the Mooney-Rivlin, Ogden, and Yeoh material models show good agreement with experimental data for modelling the base, cushion, and tread layers of the tire, respectively. The developed FE models are validated using experimental data obtained from a leading tire manufacturing company in Sri Lanka. The validated model is used to develop and analyse two distinct tire models which have two different cavity geometries (circular and elliptical) in their cushion layers to minimize heat build-up and sidewall cracks. The tire reinforcements are also rearranged to further improve the performance of the models. The introduction of cavities helps to reduce strain energy dissipation and to increase the dissipation of internal heat by convection. Furthermore, the stress intensity on the side walls is also reduced, thereby minimizing sidewall cracks. Numerical experiments show that the modified designs have a lower strain energy density, lower stress concentration, and less material utilization when compared to the basic tire design.