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The objective of the research is to investigate the turning characteristics of a two-axle, four-wheel vehicle at steady-state circular turning on sandy soft terrain. The axle load, lateral force, thrust and effective tractive effort acting on the wheeled vehicle turning on soft and hard terrain were compared. It was observed that the directions of lateral force acting to the front wheel of vehicle running on soft and hard terrain are opposite. Moreover, the lateral force acting to front wheel of the case of vehicle running on soft terrain is larger than that for the case of hard terrain. However, it is found that there is only a little difference between lateral forces acting to rear wheel of vehicle running on soft and hard terrain. It was observed that the axle load of rear wheel was larger than that of front wheel running on soft terrain and the axial force-steering angle relationships of the soft and hard terrain were almost similar.

The purpose of this study is to grasp the actual variation in the inflation pressure of large-sized, off-the-road pneumatic tires. So far the inflation pressure of a tire was regarded as in constant under operation. In this research, the variation of inflation pressure was investigated in detail for a period of four hundred days. The object of the investigation is 3300-R51 off- the-road tires having an initial inflation pressure of 850 kPa used in the heavy dump truck working in a quarry site of limestone at Kochi Prefecture of Japan. The average variation of the inflation pressure during 400 days and 9 pressure control per day was to be controlled at 21 kPa. The variation of 52 kPa in the inflation pressure within 8 hours per ordinary working day was also measured and was about 2.5 times the controlled variation. The temperature near the tire carcass was also measured.