Research On CAD Of 3D Tire Tread Patterns

With the booming of vehicle industry and tire industry, high level of tire mould design and manufacturing is demanded. The design of three-dimensional pattern on tire, which consumes a large amount of design time, is one of the key techniques in tire mould design and manufacturing, owing to the variety of patterns and their structure. The traditional 2D CAD is very difficult to meet the requirements for the accurate shape design of the mould cavity. And the general-purpose 3D CAD software is not developed specially for tire design, and its functions can not meet all the needs of three-dimensional pattern design. Therefore, the development of a special-purpose 3D CAD system is of great significance.In this paper, characteristics of the tread patterns are summarized, and the conversion of tire two-dimensional pattern to three-dimensional pattern is studied in depth. Taking the characteristics of tire mould manufacturing into account, an intersection projecting method is adopted, and the tread intersection projecting tool is developed, which is special for the electrode design in tire mould manufacturing. The methods of 3D groove surfaces modelling are summarized, and the developed system simplifies the modelling of 3D groove surfaces by reducing the number of interactive modeling operations. The relationship between the separate 3D tread patterns and the entire tire is analyzed. The system can rapidly create entire 3D tread patterns from the separate parts. In addition, rapid data-conversion tools are developed.The system developed is an interactive CAD system based on the UG NX4.0 platform. The achieved results indicate that the functions of the developed system can complete 3D groove surfaces design rapidly, and can satisfy the needs for tire manufacturing.