Simulation study on the passability of the soft lunar surface of the wire screen wheel

Abstract In order to evaluate the passing performance of the wire mesh screen wheel designed for the lunar mobile platform, a beam element co-node method was proposed to build the finite element model of the wheel net according to its special wheel net structure. The wheel net model built by the beam element co-node method not only ensures the mesh quality and wire cross-section characteristics, but also greatly reduces the number of meshes compared with the direct meshing of the model. The lunar soil discrete element particle model and the screen wheel finite element model were set up in LS-DYNA for the joint working conditions. The screen wheel designed according to the lunar platform has a sinking amount of less than 10% of the wheel diameter and a driving torque of less than 10.2N•m under various working conditions, which proves that the wheel has good passing performance.