FE Modeling And Validation Of All-Steel Radial Truck Tire Rolling Resistance

It's an urgent task to improve the fuel economy of vehicles to solve the problems associated with energy and environment. As the only part contact with road, tire Rolling Resistance (RR) directly affects the fuel economy of vehicles. For the truck tires, its RR makes a more than 30 percent contribution on the vehicle's energy consumption. This paper is to develop a methodology to simulate and optimize tire RR, and as an application, the RR of a TBR tire is modeled and validated.At first the essential mechanism of tire RR is explained based on the materials hysteretic theory. Then a complete tire deformation-energy loss-thermal analysis framework using semi-coupling method is presented. Furthermore, the developed system is used to model the RR of a TBR tire. In order to get the general behaviors of tire materials, uniaxial tension, biaxial tension, pure shear and DMA tests are designed and implemented. Parametric study is carried out to get the effects of vertical loads, inflation pressure and speeds on the RR and the RR coefficients. In addition, the contributions of different tire parts distributions on RR are investigated. At last, vertical loading and RR tests are carried out to validate the modeling results. The test tires are supplied from two famous national and international companies.It can be found from the parametric study that, tire RR and the coefficients increase as the load increases, decreases as the pressure increases, and decrease as the speed increases, if the other two parameters remain constant. Some parts as tread, tread cushion, sidewall, inner liner, up filler contribute a lot to tire rolling loss. The rolling loss of tread is about 50% of the total rolling loss of tire, while parts as bead, belts, carcass, down filler contribute much less. It is found that the simulating data and test results match quite well, which validates the developed methodology.This paper sets up a complete tire deformation-energy loss-thermal analysis framework and calculating procedure, and validates this new method with experiments, which is meaningful to tire RR simulation and optimization, and helpful for the green tire technologies.