Abstract

A system, called the “Driving Severity Monitor” (DSM), has been developed for characterizing tire force distribution as related to treadwear in either normal tire use or in tire fleet testing in a convoy. The system consists of an accelerometer for monitoring lateral accelerations, a wheel revolution counter, and a module for signal processing and read‐out. The output of the DSM is reduced to a single index, the Driving Severity Number (DSN), which characterizes a vehicle journey. The DSN is equal to the sum of squares of lateral acceleration measured once per tire revolution during a trip, divided by the number of wheel revolutions. The DSN had a high degree of correlation (R ≧ 0.95) with treadwear in two wear programs when pavement abrasiveness was held constant. This supports the concept that the three basic treadwear components: tire force distribution, pavement abrasiveness, and ambient temperature, can be separated for better understanding of tire treadwear.