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NASA invented wheels that never get punctured (www.zmescience.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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NASA invented wheels that never get punctured::Would you use this type of tire?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (2 children)

This won't work for high-speed vehicles, though. Not yet anyway. So it might be good for bicycles and wheelchairs and such. But the tires of cars and trucks generate a ton of heat from friction at high speed. And that friction is necessary for obvious reasons (traction). The high temperatures disrupt the "memory" of theses. So either they need to be made of materials that can work at higher temperatures which usually means they need to be manufactured at high temperatures that the manufacturing machinery then needs to be designed to operate at by making it from materials that operate at higher temperatures which means manufacturing that at higher temperatures and so on, or the need to make highly efficient insulation and traction layers that are thin enough that they don't affect the ability of the tire to deform and reform its shape.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

You can change the Af temp, but it is not relevant in this case because they are using the superelastic properties, not the shape memory properties if Nitinol.

https://matthey.com/products-and-markets/other-markets/medical-components/resource-library/nitinol-specification-guidelines

I question many aspects of this design for the consumer market, but not as you describe. Seems to me it's likely to be very expensive, and while you might not get flats it is still going to wear no matter what.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

That's not true - one of the proposed use cases for these tyres is airplane landing wheels which are typically designed to work at up to 235mph. Aircraft engineers have to make major compromises to make sure they can land safely with a flat tire and when they get it wrong it ends really really badly. The concord crash, for example, was caused by a flat tire. Pieces of rubber from the flat tire flew up and punched a hole into a fuel tank. The jet fuel was on fire as it poured out of the rank creating a horrific fireball and the loss of fuel pressure caused two engine failures.

113 people died and the concord was declared unsafe since there wasn't any (affordable) way to redesign the aircraft to handle a flat tyre.

Sure - the wheels they use on the rover can't handle those speeds, but it could easily be modified to work. The bicycle tyre they demonstrated is a better example. It has a rubber coating which will heat up and provide plenty of traction if properly designed.

The real issue is weight. These tires would be too heavy.