The modification of steel belt layer of airless tire for finite element analysis

Abstract

© Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd. The airless tire can be considered as composite structure since it composed of several components with different materials for desired performance. The three main components of airless tire are rubber tread, shear band and polymer spokes. The shear band composed of three complex steel belt layers and should be considered as a sub composite structure. The finite element method can be used in designing and development of airless tire. However the diversity of materials in each component including the complex sub structure resulted in complicate modelling and consuming analysis time. Thus, the large computational resources are required to analyse those components. In this research, the simplification of modelling and analysis of airless tire was attempted by modification of steel belt layers. The Mooney-Rivlin hyperelastic model was used to describe the material properties of tread and spoke. The constitutive model constants were obtained by tensile and compressive test according to ASTM D412 and D575 standards, respectively. The simplified belt, which was developed by homogenization approach, was integrated into shear band component. The airless tire model with modified steel belt layers can be used to reduce the model complexity and analysis time while yields accurate results.