bearing area of a wheel

[delagina]

I have 4 steel wheels (with brakes) supporting a structure that will be sitting on slab most of the time (years).
Each wheel will have 2500 lbs load vertical.
Since steel wheel is circular how do I calculate it's bearing area to make sure it's below concrete bearing strength.

 

[delagina]

attached is picture of the wheel

 

[IRstuff]

oddly enough: thread507-356910

thread194-416611

https://www.burnsmcd.com/insightsnews/tech/techbriefs/2011-issue-1/contact-mechanics

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[BridgeSmith]

With heavily loaded steel wheels, I would expect crushing and gouging of a concrete surface to always be a problem. You need either a surface as hard as the wheels, such as steel plates or rails, which are typically very loud, or you need some that deforms to increase the contact area. For a long-lasting solution, I suggest looking into a high modulus urethane or epoxy overlay. This company touts an epoxy with iron aggregate that produces a "heavy duty concrete topping where aggressive scraping from steel wheels, bucket loaders and front end loads frequent".

 

[WARose]

Another good source is Roark's Formulas for Stress and Strain. They have got a bunch of formulas for contact area.

 

[charliealphabravo]

The wheel has curvature in two directions but I don't see a dimension for the transverse curvature.

I agree it is unlikely that you will get away from problems with this wheel on concrete. The bearing area must be very small.

How clean can you keep the surface? Even with a slab coating of some kind, every small rock will be crushed into the concrete surface. You would be better off with a compatible wheel or perhaps the wheel can be ground flat or given a rubber running surface to increase the bearing area.