A Finite Element System for the Hierarchical Design of Agricultural Tires

Abstract Due to the many requirements with respect to the processing and operational activities of agricultural tires, their design is not an easy task. To provide support, a special purpose nonlinear FE package called Agrotyre/2D/3D has been worked out, by which 2D asymmetric and 3D boundary problems can be solved for the case of inflation and for the case of vertical loading. In the latter situation, the whole tire is meshed into 16‐noded elements including all of the lugs. By assuming the circumferential strain to be equal to zero, the asymmetric model can be analyzed for given prescribed radial displacements, and the results of the cord force distributions can be compared with that of the results of the 3D analysis. The preprocessing of the 2D and 3D meshes are on a common basis for which the data are transferred from a CAD system. In the package there is a further module by which the strength behavior of a unique lug can also be investigated. The paper presents some characteristic pictures that illus...