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Cranfield University

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Ancillary Experiments<br />

7.3.2 Influence of Contact Shape in Small Scale Experiment<br />

The spread of data shown in Figure 108 with density increase plotted vs. contact pressure<br />

lead to the idea that contact geometry could have an influence. Hence, the aim was to in-<br />

vestigate the soil behavior with different small scale plate shapes and loads simulating soil<br />

bin conditions and investigating the influence of plate geometry on sinkage.<br />

With the plate sinkage procedure as described in 2.3.2 three plates of identical surface area<br />

(and hence contact pressure at identical loads) but different geometry were tested, a circu-<br />

lar, a square (representing a possible tyre contact area), and a rectangular plate (exaggerat-<br />

ing the length to width ratio of a track by 9 %), respectively. The area of each plate is 2800<br />

mm 2 and the plates are shown in Figure 111. Each plate was tested three times at tempo-<br />

rally average loads of 0.236 kN corresponding to 84 kPa and 0.374 kN corresponding to<br />

132 kPa for 1.8 s whereby the load application simulated that of a tyre pass as shown on<br />

the left hand side in Figure 21.<br />

The resulting sinkage for the three replications and treatments with an average load of<br />

0.236 kN is plotted in Figure 112. The track shaped plate caused the least sinkage and the<br />

square plate was identical to the circular plate except for the 2 nd replication. Thus a differ-<br />

ence between the rectangular shaped plate compared to the circular and square plate can be<br />

shown. However, no clear benefit of a square to a circular plate could be shown. The cor-<br />

responding force history is shown Figure 113. As visible from Figure 113 the load applica-<br />

tion was well repeated as all curves overlap. The unsteadiness of the force during the proc-<br />

ess of taking off load is due to the slow response of the force controller in comparison to<br />

the relaxation characteristic of the soil.<br />

Tyres: 1:1 – 1:2<br />

Terra Trac: 1:4<br />

1:1<br />

1:4.5<br />

Figure 111: Plate geometry with equal area and varying perimeter length<br />

Ph.D. Thesis Dirk Ansorge (2007)<br />

153

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