Airless Humvee Tyre Under Development

The Pentagon has invested US$11 million towards the development of a tyre that will withstand damage from bullets or shrapnel. The US military body is supplying funds to Resilient Technologies, who is in the process of developing a tyre filled with compressed polymers as opposed to compressed air.

While this is not an entirely new concept, the company’s chief technology officer, Ali Manesh, believes that Resilient Technologies have developed ways to overcome the difficulties commonly associated with airless tyres. He claims that the tension of the polymer plastic provides strength, allowing the tyres to function as an air-filled tyre would, while the problem of heat build up during operation is not a problem for Resilient’s tyre.

The plan for the Humvee tyre is to produce a tyre that, according to Resilient CEO Robert Lange, can survive “something shy of a land mine.” These sentiments were echoed by company spokesman Jim Dobbs, who said “You can have all the armour in the world you want on a vehicle, but if the tyre is vulnerable, it is going to stop the vehicle. What the military hopes to do is develop the next generation of tyre to help alleviate that problem.”

Manesh, a mechanical engineer, spent five years developing the idea for the airless tyre before the company was awarded a Pentagon contract. Resilient have built a handmade prototype of the tyre, and are also currently seeking to patent the idea, with the hope of eventually producing an airless tyre for passenger cars. He claims that Resilient’s tyre is different from the Michelin ‘Tweel’, a prototype airless tyre unveiled in 2005 but also not as yet commercially available.