Aluminum Taper Bristle-Shaped Shear Band for a Nonpneumatic Tire

Abstract

ABSTRACT Shear-compliant cellular structures have been considered as replacement elastomeric materials in nonpneumatic tire (NPT) shear band to reduce hysteretic energy loss and rolling resistance. In this article, a rectangular-shaped, aluminum cellular shear band is introduced, which uses a tapered-bristle structure. The tapered-bristle geometry was designed to efficiently use material deformation by evenly distributing stresses throughout the structure under shear deformation. The resulting cellular structures are able to achieve higher shear compliance while maintaining high shear stiffness as required for NPT applications. The objective of this study was to discover how a cellular bristle shear band affects NPT performance when compared with a solid-material shear band with similar effective shear properties. An analytical model was developed to design the tapered-bristle shear band to achieve a target set of effective shear properties, and numerical tests were conducted using Abaqus to validate the analytical model. Full NPT models were created in Abaqus using the tapered-bristle shear band developed in this article and a solid-material shear band with similar effective shear properties. The performances of the two models are compared to determine the effects of a bristle shear band in terms of vertical force–deflection and contact pressure.