Mechanical Analysis Of Wheel-Soil Interaction For Lunar Rover And Design A Test-Bed

Lunar exploration plays an important role in national economical and military development. Many countries around the world begin to do research about this. Now China also starts"Chang'E"project. In order to explore the moon and carry out experiments, a lunar rover with good performance is necessary. The performance of the lunar rover depends mostly on the performance of the lunar rover's wheel, so it is important to study the mechanical performance of the wheel of lunar rover. Now some universities and institutes of China have made some samples of the lunar rovers and theirs wheels, but until now the wheel's mechanical performance is seldom researched and tested. This paper will analyze the mechanical performance of the wheel and design a test-bed to test the performance of the lunar rover's wheel.Firstly, the mechanical characters of the soil are separated to press-sinkage character and shear character based on Bekker's theory, and common press-sinkage and shear models are introduced and the theory of Lankine passive earth pressure is also introduced. These basic theories are helpful to construct model. Some parameters of soil used for experiments are measured by shear experiments.Secondly, Mechanical models of the wheel-soil interaction when rolling and steering are constructed respectively based on the theory of terrain-vehicle and passive earth pressure. Iterative algorithms are proposed to solve these models.Thirdly, A simple test-bed is designed to test the performance of the wheel, and experiments are carried out with the test-bed, the result of the experiments shows that the models constructed above are valid.Lastly, to study the performance of the wheel further, another test-bed is designed which includes the mechanical structure and data acquisition system, and the key technologies concerned are discussed.