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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.

Recent research at Clemson University has focused on the development of an advanced non-pneumatic, non-elastomeric lunar wheel for NASA with superior traction. This paper reports on several concepts for tread materials and geometries that have been explored for tire-on-sand use. Specifically, fourteen concepts, involving the use of metal meshes, textile carpet materials, soft grousers, foams, and screens, were physically tested in an on-vehicle environment. Prototypes for each concept and formal test procedures to quantify traction were developed. This paper presents the results of the tests for several different concepts and the comparison between the concepts that were developed. Students developed their own testing environment through which these test procedures are implemented, an inclined hill 45 ft. in length and 8 ft. wide will approximately 6 inches deep filled with sand.

In an effort to build a shear band of a lunar rover wheel which operates at lunar surface temperatures (40 to 400K), the design of a metallic cellular shear band is suggested. Six representative honeycombs with aluminum alloy (7075-T6) are tailored to have a shear modulus of 6.5MPa which is a shear modulus of an elastomer by changing cell wall thickness, cell angles, cell heights and cell lengths at meso-scale. The designed cellular solids are used for a ring typed shear band of a wheel structure at macro-scale. A structural performance such as contact pressure at the outer layer of the wheel is investigated with the honeycomb shear bands when a vertical force is applied at the center of the wheel. Cellular Materials Theory (CMT) is used to obtain in-plane effective properties of a honeycomb structure at meso-scale. Finite Element Analysis (FEA) with commercial software ABAQUS is employed to investigate the structural behavior of a wheel at macro-scale.