Abstract

Over the past ten years the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) has been increasingly integrated into the tire design process. The FEA has been used to study the general tire behavior, to perform parameter studies, and to do comparative analyses. To decrease the tire development cycle, the FEA is now being used as a replacement for certain tire tests. This requires the accuracy of the FEA results to be within those test limits. This paper investigates some of the known modeling techniques and their impact on accuracy. Some of the issues are the use of shell elements, assumptions for boundary conditions, and global/local analysis approaches. Finally, the use of new generation supercomputers, massively parallel processing systems (MPP), is discussed.