Abstract:
Off-road vehicles' performance depends strongly on two major factors; the vehicle design, and the soil type. One of the efficient methods used to ameliorate vehicle performance is adjusting the inflation pressure to suit the ground bearing capacity. These present work deals with designing and building a laboratory test rig that enables adjusting the inflation pressure of a single tyre according to a specific control strategy based on getting a specific tyre deformation that suit the drive condition on soft soils such as fine sand. The built instrumentation system receives, processes, and sends signal data from and to the tested tyre by using the LabView software. A large volume of experimental data related to tyre load, pressure, soil density, and resulting tyre deformation and soil sinkage have been used to develop a relationship between tyre sinkage and load for three soil densities (loose – medium – dense). The relationship represents the base for the control strategy. The results of application of the used control strategy showed that tyre pressure can be adaptively controlled to reach the so called tyre flotation pressure within an acceptable time response.