Simulation Analysis On The Wheel And Soil System Of The Lunar Rover Wheel

The lunar rover carried by the Chang’e-3lunar probe has important missions. Thesteady land of the lunar rover on the lunar surface is the premise, which is also crucial torealize the plan of moon probe. Considering that the land position of the lunar rover isconfirmed, it is necessary to research the traffic ability when the rover passes a variety oflunar surface conditions of the moon maria area. So it is of great importance to makeexperiments and simulation on the lunar rover traffic ability on the earth.The traffic ability of the lunar rover is closely connected with the condition of thelunar soil when running on the moon surface. The drag bar force will be different as well asthe traffic ability when the physical parameters of the lunar soil are different. The longerhistory the lunar soil has, the more compressed it is. In this paper we make three kinds oflunar soil simulant to take place of the real lunar soil, and simulate the different compactcondition of the lunar soil, such as the loose condition, the natural condition and thecompressed condition. After the tests of the physical parameters, the shear characterparameters and the compact character parameters, it is concluded that all of the anti-shearstrength, density, cohesion, inner friction angle increase with the compact condition of thelunar soil simulation.With the self-designed lunar soil simulant-wheel test system, the author tests thetraffic ability of the lunar rover wheel on different loads, styles of the wheels, wheelslippages, and also tests the traffic ability when the rover passed the lunar soil simulantmany times. The results show that with the larger loads, the wheel did more shear damageto the lunar soil stimulant as well as the bulldozing force of the lunar soil and the wheelsinkage. Under the same loads, of all the three kinds of wheel, the drag bar force and thesinkage of the18rut wheel is the largest while the smooth wheel is the smallest. As thepassing times increase, the drag bar force and the sinkage of the wheel increase linearly.The changes of the compact condition of the lunar soil simulant always result in the changes of physical parameters of the lunar soil simulant. Besides the experiments, theauthor makes research on the influence of parameter changes on the wheel traffic ability inuse of MATLAB. The index includes the wheel sinkage, the compact resistance, thebulldozing resistance and the drag bar force. And also the GUI is designed to make theresult more visual. The calculation results show that of all the factors the cohesion modulusis the most influential on the wheel sinkage and the compact resistance. The soil index hasthe most influence on the bulldozing resistance. The bulldozing resistance decreased by80%when the soil index increased by33%. The drag bar force increased linearly with thecohesion.This paper also simulates the interaction between lunar rover wheel and lunar soilsimulant. During the simulation there are three loads which are100N,200N and300Nrespectively, three kinds of wheels which are the smooth wheel, the18rut wheel and the36rut wheel. The lunar soil simulant is of different compaction conditions which are the loosecondition, the natural condition and the compaction condition. The simulation analyzes thedrag bar force and the wheel sinkage, and is compared with the experiment results. Thelargest difference between the simulation result and the experiment result is20.3%, whichshows that the FEM is available on simulating the interaction between the lunar roverwheel and the lunar soil simulant.