TERRE HAUTE —
im Benzing was dreaming of becoming an engineer the last time America had a vehicle riding across the surface of the moon.
Now, his ingenuity and keen can-do spirit have helped The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration develop an airless tire to transport large, long-range vehicles across the surface of the moon — and possibly revolutionize transportation on Earth, too.
Benzing, a 1977 Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology mechanical engineering alumnus, served as Goodyear’s lead innovator on the new “Spring Tire,” designed to carry much heavier vehicles over much greater distances than the wire mesh tire previously used on the Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle.
The new tire will allow for broader exploration and the eventual development and maintenance of a lunar outpost.
The tire was installed on NASA’s Lunar Electric Rover test vehicle and put through its paces at the Johnson Space Center’s “Rock Yard” in Houston, where it performed successfully. Further testing is planned later this year.
“This tire is extremely durable and extremely energy efficient,” notes Benzing, a principal engineering with Goodyear.
“The spring design contours to the surface on which it’s driven to provide traction. But all of the energy used to deform the tire is returned when the springs rebound. It doesn’t generate heat like a normal tire,” Benzing said.
Development of the original Apollo lunar mission tires, and the new Spring Tire, were driven by the fact that traditional rubber, pneumatic (air-filled) tires used on earth have little utility on the moon. This is because rubber properties vary significantly between the extreme cold and hot temperatures experienced in the shaded and directly sunlit areas of the moon. Furthermore, unfiltered solar radiation degrades rubber, and pneumatic tires pose an unacceptable risk of deflation.
Further complicating matters were requirements for the Spring Tire to handle 10 times the load capacity and 20 times the durability of the original lunar mission tires. This was a significant change in requirements that required innovation, according to Vivake Asnani, NASA’s principal investigator at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.
“With the combined requirements of increased load and life, we needed to make a fundamental change to the original moon tire,” stated Asnani in a Goodyear news release. “What the Goodyear-NASA team developed is an innovative, yet simple network of interwoven springs that does the job. The tire design seems almost obvious in retrospect, as most good inventions do.”
Benzing joined the development project nearly two years ago.
“I like challenges. Really, it was an offer that I couldn’t refuse,” he said.
Initial Slinky-style designs, featuring interwoven wires coils, satisfied load capacity requirements, but failed durability testing. The technological breakthrough came when Benzing realized that a series of small springs, when added to the wire frame, could ensure constant tension within the structure of the tire -– through a series of 100 screw pitches and 100 points of contact. This innovative idea provided the desired durability.
“There are so many points of contact, distributing the load across so many areas, that it creates an almost indestructible unit,” said Benzing, whose name is on the patented technology.
NASA has been so impressed with the tire that it highlighted this technology development in its annual Hallmarks of Success video series. The series features NASA’s most positive corporate team efforts with many of the technologies being shown to policymakers in Washington, D.C.
“Designing something that could someday be on the moon is beyond anything that I ever dreamed possible,” Benzing said. “Totally changing an industry has always been my goal. I think you’re going to hear some really exciting things coming from this technology in the future. When that happens, it will drastically change the tire industry.”
The Technology Behind The Spring Tire . . .
The Spring Tire lives up to its name, with 840 load bearing springs and an intricate wiring system allowing the tire to carry much heavier vehicles over much greater distances. The tire was designed without a single point failure mode, meaning that a hard impact that might cause a pneumatic tire to puncture and deflate would only damage one of the 840 load bearing springs. Along with having this ultra-redundant characteristic, the tire has a combination of overall stiffness yet flexibility that allows off-road vehicles to travel rapidly fast over rough terrain with relatively little motion being transferred to the vehicle.
The tire is eight inches wide, 28 inches in oval circumference and weighs 42 pounds.
The tire’s characteristics are a great improvement over the wire mesh tire previously used on the Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle. The new tire will allow for broader exploration and the eventual development and maintenance of a lunar outpost.
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