Extended model for calculation of soil-wheel contact area parameters in rigid soil-deformable tyre approximation

This article presents a new model for dynamic simulation of rigid soil-deformable tyre approximation. Previous models are not ready to be implemented in computational simulations, for two main reasons: 1) they do not cover all possible operational regimes of a wheel only slip values between 0 and 1, whereas the wheel can assume both values superior to 1 and negative values; 2) most of them offer a bad approximation for calculation of contact parameters such as length, width and area of contact with quadratic mean errors superior to 100%. Therefore, this article extends the already-established Julien method for deformable soil to all slip values, and provides a new method for contact area calculation that reduces the quadratic mean error to the order of 10%, relative to empirical data. This is important for dynamic simulations of vehicles, as the deformable tyre-rigid soil method is applicable for almost all situations in the automotive regime; and applications are limitless, from estimating the influence of new parts adapted to an automobile, to using it to simulate the dynamics of a VR-model. Copyright © 2019 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.