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To facilitate the design of a non-pneumatic tire for NASA's new Moon mission, the authors used the Finite Element Method (FEM) to investigate the interaction between soil and non-pneumatic tire made of different cellular shear bands. Cellular shear bands, made of an aluminum alloy (AL7075-T6), are designed to have the same effective shear modulus of 6.5E+6 Pa, which is the shear modulus of an elastomer. The Lebanon sand of New Hampshire is used in the model. This sand has a complete set of material properties in the literature and Drucker-Prager/Cap plasticity constitutive law with hardening is employed to model the sand. The tires are treated as deformable bodies, and the authors used the penalty contact algorithm to model the tangential behavior of the contact. The friction between tire and sand is considered by using Coulomb's law. Numerical results show deformation of sand and tire.

In this paper, the Finite Element Method (FEM) is used to investigate the tread profile effects on the performance of the cellular shear band-based non-pneumatic tire when interacting with sand for the NASA's new Moon mission. This non-pneumatic tire consists of three major components: a critical cellular shear band, two inextensible circumferential membranes, and a group of deformable spokes. The cellular shear bands made of an aluminum alloy (AL7075-T6), are designed to have the same effective shear modulus of 6.5E+6 Pa. In this research, the shear band with cellular geometry of (θ = -65°, h = 21) is used. The Lebanon sand found in New Hampshire is used in this research and Drucker-Prager/Cap plasticity constitutive law with hardening is employed to describe the behavior of the sand. The tire and treads with different profiles are treated as deformable elastic bodies.