Editorial Type:
Article Category: Research Article
 | 
Online Publication Date: 01 Apr 2017

Prediction of Uneven Tire Wear Using Wear Progress Simulation

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Page Range: 87 – 100
DOI: 10.2346/tire.17.450201
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ABSTRACT

Tire wear performance is very important in terms of safety and economic benefit for customers and environmental conservation. Tire wear performance can be sorted into “global” or “local” wear. Local wear means uneven tire wear, for example, heel/toe wear, one-sided shoulder wear, feather edge wear, etc. This uneven wear decreases tire life locally and has the potential for causing a noise problem, so it is very important to improve uneven wear performance for long life tire. It is difficult to correctly evaluate the uneven tire wear performance of a brand-new tire, because the tire wear performance changes with tire pattern shape transformation as it wears. In order to experimentally evaluate uneven wear performance accurately, we have to do time-consuming tire road tests. Therefore, we need a prediction method for uneven wear.

In this paper, we introduce “wear progress simulation” developed in order to evaluate heel/toe wear performance, which occurs in the shoulder blocks. This method involves “wearing out the finite element (FE) tire model” using wear energy calculated from tire rolling simulation. By this method, we can observe the transformation of tire pattern shape and wear energy distribution. As a result, we can estimate the difference of heel/toe wear performance among tires by our developed simulation.

Keywords: tire; wear; heel/toe; finite element method; simulation; wear progress
FIG. 1
FIG. 1

Tire modeling process.

FIG. 2
FIG. 2

Boundary conditions for tire rolling simulation.

FIG. 3
FIG. 3

Calculation method of shear stress and slip.

FIG. 4
FIG. 4

Wear energy distribution.

FIG. 5
FIG. 5

Time history data of pressure, shear stress, and slip.

FIG. 6
FIG. 6

Definition of global wear and Local wear.

FIG. 7
FIG. 7

Multiple regression analysis of wear profile.

FIG. 8
FIG. 8

Prediction of global wear index per rib.

FIG. 9
FIG. 9

Heel/toe wear after outdoor test.

FIG. 10
FIG. 10

Process of wear progress simulation.

FIG. 11
FIG. 11

Direction of wearing-out tire model.

FIG. 12
FIG. 12

Tire pattern model evaluated heel/toe wear performance.

FIG. 13
FIG. 13

Definition of heel/toe wear index.

FIG. 14
FIG. 14

Transition of heel/toe wear index.

FIG. 15
FIG. 15

Transition of the difference of wear energy between heel and toe side.

FIG. 16
FIG. 16

Heel/toe index predicted by FEM and measured by outdoor test.

FIG. 17
FIG. 17

Transition of wear energy distribution.

FIG. 18
FIG. 18

Transition of pressure distribution.

Contributor Notes

1 Corresponding author. Research Department 1, Sumitomo Rubber Industries, Ltd., 1-1, 2-chome, Tsutsui-cho, Chuo-ku, Kobe, Hyogo, 651-0071, Japan. Email: r-tamada.az@srigroup.co.jp
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