Abstract

The dynamically rolling tire is simulated by using an explicit finite element method. In this simulation, the complicated pattern shape and internal construction of the tire are modeled exactly since both these factors are very important for the performance properties of the tire. A very long calculation time is necessary for refined tire models, but, for practical tire development, the calculation time of this simulation is acceptable because of major advances in hardware, FEM software, and modeling techniques.

The authors describe the model used in the simulation and report on the results of several properties under various rolling conditions of the tire evaluated by this method. The correlation between the simulation and the experiment appears good. Therefore, this simulation technique can be assumed very useful for actual tire development.