Modeling And Contact Features Investigation Of Radial Tire Utilizing ABAQUS

Tire contacts ground with a card size, resulting in the contact patch and contact pressure. Due to the viscoelasticity, the contact distribution is asymmetric, which affects the safety, comfortableness and driving performance of vehicle. Due to the complexity of the rubber and structure, the finite element method becomes one of the important tools for tire research. Therefore, it is significant to investigate the influence of tire physical parameters on contact features, aiming at improving the performance of tire.The cross section of tire was built first in terms of the structure and materials properties of tire. Then the tire 3D FE model was gridded in the commercial code Hypermesh, and then imported into commercial code ABAQUS for loading, constraining and post processing. For describing the tire materials more exactly, Mooney-Rivlin and rebar model were employed to simulate the ultraelastic rubber property and rubber-cord thread composite material, respectively.The experiment was conducted for measuring contact features in steady state conditions. The influence of tire inflation pressure and vertical load on tire contact patch, contact pressure distribution and deflection distance were investigated. The results of the experiments were compared with that of FE models.The asymmetric factor was defined to describe the phenomenon of asymmetry for the contact pressure. And the influence of tire parameters on contact distribution was explored. The warping factor was defined to analyze the warping phenomenon of the tire. And similarly, the influence of tire parameters on contact pressure distribution was investigated.Finally, an empirical formula was presented for describing the tire 3D contact features based on the results of FE models. The results of empirical formula and FE simulation were compared and are agreed well.The paper provides a methodology for describing the 3D contact features easily, for saving the time for tire mechanical simulation and for describing tire wear more precisely.