SBIR Phase I: The Reinvention of the Wheel. For Agricultural Uses and Beyond.

This SBIR Phase I project will explore the potential benefits of a sine wave shaped wheel compared to a traditional circular wheel for the central pivot irrigation industry. The central pivot irrigation industry is an essential segment of the agriculture industry and this project aims to deliver a superior wheel that solves the persistent issue of trench-digging that leads to equipment breakdown, down time, lost profits, and crop-loss. The broader significance of eliminating trench-digging would be significant savings for farmers, distributors and consumers. Agriculture is the largest industry in the world, and developing a wheel that eliminates an issue that plagues the industry is the central goal of this project. The development of a sine wave wheel also potentially impact other fields as the technology can be used in over one-hundred different industries. The technical innovation of this project is creating a wheel that is non-circular. The wheel will exhibit the blending of multiple shapes in one design including a sine wave, cube, circle and hexagon. It will be approximately 4.5 feet tall, and weighing approximately 400lbs for use in the farming industry. The concept is to create two wheels in tandem where the sine waves are out-of-phase from one another. The front wheel would create a left-right-left path into the soil, much like the path a snake would leave behind traversing soil. The rear wheel would move in an opposite right-left-right configuration leaving a double helix footprint in its wake. The opposing wheels would push the soil back toward center, eliminating the largest issue plaguing the industry: trench digging. The sine wave wheel technology has already been scientifically proven on a smaller scale in the skateboarding industry to reduce friction, increase longevity, increase off-road ability, and increase speed. Multiple wheel iterations will be manufactured and subsequently tested in this project using off-the-shelf hubs within the industry and rubber tires. The wheel will not be pneumatic and will never go flat.