Review of modeling methods of compressed snow-tire interaction

Snow traction is a key performance characteristic for tire design. Designing snow tires requires extensive testing on snow-covered proving grounds. Thus, numerical simulation could be a more efficient and less costly method of improving tire designs. Various numerical approaches, such as analytical methods, grid-based methods, and particle-based methods were employed for compacted snow modeling in literature. Analytical models of compacted snow were developed based on various assumptions about snow mechanics and tire-snow interaction. With increasing the computational power, grid-based methods (especially Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian method) showed to provide effective modeling of complex tire-snow interaction behavior. However, these approaches showed some limitations in modelling large and discontinuous deformation problems associated with tire-snow interaction. Therefore, recently, the use of particle-based methods, which overcome these limitations, has recently sparked interest in tire-snow modeling. The numerical studies related to the modeling tire-snow interaction are briefly reviewed in this paper. Furthermore, various constitutive snow material models and different failure theories used in literature, which are essential for numerical tire-compacted snow simulations, are also reviewed. Overall, this review paper could be useful for researchers interested in modeling the tire – snow interactions and even tire-deformable soil interaction.