Explicit Finite Element Analysis For Tire Cornering With Tread Pattern Effects

Tire tread pattern is an important tire design parameter, which has a direct impact on driving performance and tires'life. In an early stage, a new reasonable pattern design can only be obtained by means of long and costly tests. Since the1970s, finite element analysis has been widely used in tire industry, but due to the complexity of tread patterns, early tire FE analysis ignored the tread patterns. Over the past decade, finite element modeling and analysis for radial tires with complex tread patterns considered draws focused attention from the engineering and academic fields, but how to develop an efficient finite element tire model with complex tread patterns and the corresponding solving strategy in complex cases is still a challenging subject in tire technology. This dissertation makes a preliminary study on the problem.Based on 205/55R16 PCR tire, the finite element models for different tread design tires are constructed with quasi-conformal mapping cluster and integrated, high-quality hexahedral meshes are obtained. The implicit to explicit FEA solving strategy of patterned tire structure is founded with the case of cornering. The numerical results with little oscillatory response indicate that the model and the solving strategy are efficient.The influences of the tread design on tire cornering characteristics are studied. The numerical results indicate that the cornering stiffness and aligning stiffness of patterned tires decrease obviously compared to smooth tread tire. And the difference between various kinds of patterned tires has little effect on the cornering stiffness and aligning stiffness. However, compared with other patterned tires, the residual lateral force and residual aligning moment of the asymmetric tread tire decrease obviously.The influences of the tread design on contact pressure distribution with the case of cornering are studied. The footprint shapes of patterned tires are almost the same as the smooth tread one, but the existence of the pattern blocks increases the contact pressure level and the unevenness of contact pressure distribution. The difference between various kinds of patterned tires has little effect on the contact pressure value. In the case of cornering, obvious distortion has taken place at the edge of some pattern blocks due to the high-level lateral friction stress.