I am currently designing a deformable wheel for a six-wheeled lunar vehicle and I am trying to model the trafficability of this wheel on a lunar surface. To do this I am using Bekker’s Equations.
My question: I found normalized DP (drawbar pull) values of 26 for a wheel with grousers and a value of 0.48 for the same wheel, but without grousers. The value of 26 seems very high based on results I have found in other papers online so I am skeptical of my results and need help confirming that the assumptions and calculations I made make sense. I have attached a .pdf that walks you through what I did and assumptions I made. Along with this I highlighted areas where I am uncertain as they may be possible areas of error.
Thanks again for your time and any advice relating to this will be very helpful since this is my first time working with Bekker's equations and wheel-soil interactions in general.
Note: the soil characteristics I used were the recommend ones found in the Lunar hand guide
I am starting to think that the equation I used for Soil Thrust with grousers is unit dependent for in,lbf. With that being said, I converted my cm and N values to in and lbf and tried it again. This gave me a normalized DP value of 1.46 which seem to be more in the realm of reason.
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