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In this work, an indoor soil-bin is designed to investigate the tire–terrain interaction mechanisms for the off-road tires rolling on the gravel terrain. The soil-bin test is carried out by the indoor soil-bin experimental device and the three-dimensional (3D) finite element (FE) and discrete element (DE) coupling method under the same particles conditions, respectively. First, with the indoor soil-bin measurement system, the repeatability of the soil-bin experiments is employed to validate the experimental device and the numerical models. Moreover, the tractive performance experiments of the off-road tires with two tread patterns, smooth and grooved interacting with gravel terrain, are performed at the slip of 10%, 20% and 30%, respectively, to obtain the tractive force and the rim sinkage. Second, the corresponding numerical models are also established, and simulated by the FE–DE coupling method, where the FEM and the DEM are used to describe the off-road tires and the gravel terrain, respectively. The tractive mechanisms of the off-road tires in interaction with the gravel terrain such as the tractive force and the rim sinkage are investigated numerically. Meanwhile, The dynamics and discontinuity of the gravel assembly are described by the presented approach. Besides, both the results of the simulations and experiments indicate that tread patterns and slip conditions have great influence on the tire tractive performance. Finally, the numerical simulations and the experimental results qualitatively show good agreements, which certifies the effectiveness of the FE–DE coupling method in the tractive performance analysis of tire–gravel terrain interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A freely combined three-dimensional (3D) discrete and finite element (FE) algorithm is developed. The algorithm, which is based on the method combining the discrete element (DE) and the corresponding node of the FE proposed by Lei and Zang, treats each combined point on the facet of the FE as the corresponding node of the method. This new algorithm includes global search, local search and the combined force calculation processes. The combined force between the DE and FE is processed by using a penalty function method. Following that, the corresponding numerical code is implemented into the in-house developed code, a dynamic explicit DE/FE code named CDFP. To test the accuracy of the proposed algorithm and the corresponding numerical code, the vibration process of two beams under dynamic force and the vibration process of two glass plates under impact of rigid sphere are simulated in elastic range. By comparing the results with those calculated by using LS-DYNA, it is shown that they agree with each other very well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]