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

  • sugartits@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    110
    arrow-down
    47
    ·
    11 months ago

    NASA invented wheels that never get punctured

    No they fucking didn’t.

    Wheels that don’t puncture have been around for centuries

    We don’t use them because they are more shit than normal tyres for the majority of use cases.

    Specific use cases, such as those faced by NASA may benefit from having such a feature, but to say they “invented” wheels that don’t puncture is an outright lie.

    Who the fuck wrote this trash?

    • wahming@monyet.cc
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      71
      arrow-down
      10
      ·
      11 months ago

      The Superelastic Tire offers traction equal or superior to conventional pneumatic tires and eliminates both the possibility of puncture failures and running “under-inflated”, thereby improving automobile fuel efficiency and safety. Also, this tire design does not require an inner frame which both simplifies and lightens the tire/wheel assembly.

      Except that NASA’s new tires are actually better than normal tires in the normal use cases. Hence the word invented. Did you actually read the article before criticising it?

      • herrvogel@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        11 months ago

        Traction is not the only factor. How does this new tire affect steering? How much noise does it make as it rolls on the ground? How much noise does it make as air flows over it at high speed? How durable is it? How does it handle high rotational speeds? How does it handle impact? How does it handle braking? How does it handle different weather and road conditions, different temperatures? How does it treat the road surface? And can it be manufactured at such huge scales? There are plenty of reasons why it might very well be completely unsuitable as car tires.

        • wahming@monyet.cc
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          11 months ago

          Yes? I’m not here claiming it’s the perfect car tire, I’m merely disputing parent’s comment

      • sugartits@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        13
        arrow-down
        40
        ·
        11 months ago

        That’s not inventing, that’s improving.

        The word is clearly being misused for clickbait purposes.

        • KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          36
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          They… Invented these tyres… Right? Just because stone wheels were a thing doesn’t mean that someone didn’t invent wooden wheels.

          Invent

          Verb: create or design (something that has not existed before); be the originator of.

          “he invented an improved form of the steam engine”

          • sugartits@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            arrow-down
            7
            ·
            edit-2
            11 months ago

            “he invented an improved form of the steam engine”

            Literally the exact point I’m making.

            In that statement, he didn’t invent the steam engine. He invented an improved form of it. But not the steam engine itself.

            • Patch@feddit.uk
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              12
              ·
              11 months ago

              At some point we’re just getting bogged down in semantics. Someone invented the internal combustion engine, and the earliest versions ran on gaseous fuels. Somebody else “invented” versions that than on liquid fuels. Engines that ran on petrol (gas) and diesel were “invented” by separate people. Engines based on turbine, reciprocating pistons, and rotary mechanisms were all “invented” by separate people.

              The degree to which you consider any of those independent “inventions” versus simply modifying and improving existing inventions is essentially arbitrary.

                • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  11 months ago

                  Correct. Tvs are improvements on still images, which themselves are an improvement on pictographs, which are an improvement on transmission of ideas via language.

                  To be clear, we very much invented all of that.

    • Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      48
      ·
      11 months ago

      They didn’t invent the concept of punctureless wheels, but they certainly invented a set a wheels that are punctureless

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      11 months ago

      Yeah, the first wheels couldn’t be punctured. Puncturable wheels are fairly modern.

    • Boiglenoight@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      11 months ago

      Why curse or get angry? The author got it wrong. You pointed it out. 👍 You also raised my blood pressure a smidge.

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      Wheels that don’t puncture have been around for centuries

      What does that have to do with it? Those were a different design. Sure, this invention shares a couple of features with past inventions but that doesn’t mean it’s the same invention.

      Most puncture proof tires are too hard. A good tire is soft enough to have a large flat area where it touches the road (or some other shape, if the road is bumpy).

  • herrvogel@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    37
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    11 months ago

    There are plenty of tires that are puncture-proof. But they all have other major downsides. They’re all a different combination of expensive, loud, uncomfortable, and unsafe. That’s why none of them ever caught on beyond some specific applications.

  • Obinice@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    11 months ago

    There’s almost no way bare metal gives the same traction as rubber tyres do. They say it does, but I’d need some really solid data to back that up, for all conditions that the average car will face, not just lab controlled perfect conditions. Tarmac, dirt, snow, rain, heat, cold, etc.

    Also one thing I don’t see mentioned is noise pollution. As cars go electric, more and more so the main source of noise from cars becomes their tyres. It’s weird but true. Think of a motorway and how loud the sound of all those tyres rolling is. These would have to be quieter than rubber tyres to be viable.

    Also there’s no mention of cost or metal fatigue/wear. Rubber tyres are likely much cheaper to produce - even accounting for economies of scale, they use far less exotic materials.

    And I’d be curious how long these tyres last vs traditional tyres through use and wear, how their characteristics such as traction change over time, how they handle hitting debris on the road, be it bits of rocks or whatever. The things cars contend with here and there regularly.

    So, while this technology is potentially very promising in a hybrid tyre (like the bicycle tyre shown in the article, Vs the full-metal tyre shown), I have my doubts that need quelling before I see it going anywhere in its full metal state for general use. Specialised, maybe.

    I’d love to find something that can replace rubber, and importantly be quieter, and maybe this avenue of research can lead to some great results. I just have my doubts that we’re there yet.

  • irotsoma@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • HessiaNerd@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      11 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.

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      11 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.

    • gaifux@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      11 months ago

      Well all that technology was lost so they had to build it back again. It’s a painful process

  • Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    11 months ago

    I don’t quite get the purpose of that bike tire. Tubeless tires are basically puncture proof aswell. I’d imagine that much metal just makes it unecessarily heavy.

    • ikidd@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      11 months ago

      Tubeless tires are basically puncture proof

      Where do you get that from? Vehicle tires are all tubeless, they are far from puncture proof.

      • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        Tubeless bicycle tires are often used with slime as otherwise they tend to leak from the edge of the rim as the pressure isn’t usually high enough to create a perfect seal. That also means they are effectively “self-healing” and puncture proof. Also tires that have this strip of goopy glue like stuff on the inside that seals all by itself are starting to get rather common as well.

      • Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        11 months ago

        The tire sealant that is used inside tubeless bike tires seals small holes by itself. Driving over a nail is not going to be an issue.

    • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      11 months ago

      Puncture resistant, not puncture proof. Tubeless sets with sealant can take multiple punctures before losing too much air ans/or sealant.
      Also larger punctures don’t get sealed by the sealant alone, but you need to fill the hole with something like rubber plugs

      Puncture proof would mean that they can’t be punctured or that puncture had zero effect

    • june@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      11 months ago

      They keep calling it lightweight but aren’t saying what that weight is. It’s gotta be in the ballpark of a rubber tire to really be viable, so I’d say 4lbs at the absolute top end. More than that and it may reduce rolling resistance while shooting itself in the foot with the added rotational mass.

  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    11 months ago

    Last time I tried to source Nitinol was back in the '90s - is it actually cheap and available now?

  • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    11 months ago

    Something to bear in mind, how much distance will a rover cover during it’s lifetime? Single digit KM? And they also don’t weigh much either.

      • Patch@feddit.uk
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        It’s a fair point. Curiosity has “only” travelled about 20 miles over its 12 year life so far. And while it weighs some 900 kilos, Martian gravity is only 38% that of Earth.

        Obviously it’s absurd to compare the wear and tear on something rumbling around the Martian tundra cut off from any support or maintenance for a decade, but it is a very different use case to your average Earthly car or lorry. What lasts a decade going at 0.1mph for 20 miles in an alien desert is not necessarily going to last a week going at 70mph down an asphalt highway.

      • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        11 months ago

        As of December 9, 2020, the rover was 23.32 km (14.49 mi) away from its landing site. As of April 17, 2020, the rover has been driven on fewer than 800 of its 2736 sols (Martian days). As of 30 May, 2023 it had traveled 30.00 km (18.64 mi).

        Some people drive that to get to work.

        So maybe lose the smug, condescending attitude?