Investigation Of Cornering Properties Due To Tire Design Parameters

Handling stability depends largely on the tire cornering properties, so the research on the cornering properties is the basis of the study on vehicle handling stability. The major method of vehicle handling evaluation is subjective evaluation. The items of the subjective evaluation include straight-line driving characteristics, steering response, yaw stability and cornering stability. All of these items have relation with cornering stiffness, ply steer residual aligning torque and ply steer residual lateral force, which are related to tire belt structure, cap ply structure, the hardness of bead filler and some other design parameters. Hence, the investigation of cornering properties due to tire design parameters may be helpful to optimize the tire cornering properties.From the viewpoint of modeling, tire models that can reflect the effect of the design parameters could be obtained via processing a large number of tire testing data. But it is costly and time-consuming for tire enterprises to conduct such a large number of tests, which is also not necessary from the aspect of engineering application. The rapid development of computer performance and the commercial finite element software has made the simulation study on these problems mentioned above be of great benefit for engineering applications.Based on one type of PCR tire, the finite element models have been developed by using the commercial finite element software ABAQUS for the investigation on how the tire design parameters affect the tire cornering properties.Firstly, the FEM model of patterned tire has been established. Then the cornering conditions were added to build up a complete tire cornering model which is for the investigation of tire cornering properties.Secondly, different analysis schemes were applied to the tire cornering models. Then the models that represent various design parameters were calculated by using FEM to analyse their cornering properties. After that, the cornering stiffness, ply steer residual aligning torque and ply steer residual lateral force were used as evaluation criterion to evaluate how the design parameters affect the cornering properties. The simulation results were consistent with the experimental results, which has verified the validity of the proposed method.