Tire Modeling for Heavy Equipment with Simscape

Simscape helps you design heavy equipment. In this video, we're going to look at modeling tires that contact the ground. Tires for heavy equipment often have irregular profiles and need to run on uneven terrain.

Using Matlab commands, we can import the CAD geometry and extract a set of points for the outer surface of the tire. These points can be leveraged directly by the point cloud block. The spatial contact force block models contact between these points and the grid surface that defines the terrain.

Another option is the magic formula force and torque block. This has a more elaborate model for a normal force and friction force calculations. For very streamlined calculations, we can simply use basic geometry, such as a disk or a sphere. You can download the model we have provided and tailor the tire model to match the behavior of your system.