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Currently used tire models have shown a certain lack of accuracy in some advanced handling applications. This lack of accuracy is believed to be partly due to thermal effects. In reality, the tire rubber temperature is not constant during the normal operating conditions and it's really well known that the tire friction coefficient strongly depends on the temperature level. The temperature generation, propagation and evolution are the result of a dynamic energy equilibrium between phenomena of different natures. Various mechanisms create a non-uniform temperature distribution in various parts of the tire structure: heat is generated in zones with large cyclic deformations due to the energy dissipated from the rubber strains and in the sliding part of the contact patch due to friction. The rubber cools down because the heat energy transferred to the air (internally and externally) and to the asphalt in the stick zone of the contact patch.

During the last ten years, there is a significant tendency in automotive design to use lower aspect ratio tires and meanwhile also more and more run-flat tires. In appropriate publications, the influences of these tire types on the dynamic loads - transferred from the road passing wheel center into the car - have been investigated pretty well, including comparative wheel force transducer measurements as well as simulation results. It could be shown that the fatigue input into the vehicle tends to increase when using low aspect ratio tires and particularly when using run-flat tires. But which influences do we get for the loading and fatigue behavior of the respective rims? While the influences on the vehicle are relatively easy to detect by using wheel force transducers, the local forces acting on the rim flange (when for example passing a high obstacle) are much more difficult to detect (in measurement as well as in simulation).

A methodology for an efficient failure prediction of automotive steel wheels during fatigue experimental tests is proposed. The strategy joins the CDTire simulative package effectiveness to a specific wheel finite element model in order to deeply monitor the stress distribution among the component to predict damage. The numerical model acts as a Software-in-the-loop and it is calibrated with experimental data. The developed tool, called VirtualWheel, can be applied for the optimisation of design reducing prototyping and experimental test costs in the development phase. In the first section, the failure criterion is selected. In the second one, the conversion of hardware test-rig into virtual model is described in detail by focusing on critical aspects of finite element modelling. In conclusion, failure prediction is compared with experimental test results.

The full vehicle simulation on durability proving grounds is a well established technique in the pre-development process of passenger car manufacturers. The respective road surfaces are designed to generate representative spindle loads and typically include events that will result in large tire deformations. Depending on manufacturer and the combination of vehicle size and wheel properties, these deformations can be so large that the tire belt and/or sidewall have contact with the rim crown (protected by the tire sidewall). The current tendency to low-aspect ratio tires reduces the available deformation capability of the tire while simultaneously introducing larger nonlinearities in the sidewall behavior (see [ 2 ]). This paper is based on a co-development project between Fraunhofer LBF and Honda R&D and is dealing with the development of a tire model, which can accurately handle very large deformations of the tire up to misuse-like applications.

In the last two years, Fraunhofer has developed an advanced tire model which is real-time capable. This tire model is designed for ride comfort and durability applications for passenger cars and trucks, as well as for agricultural and construction machines. The model has a flexible belt structure with typically about 150 degrees of freedom and a brush contact formulation. To obtain sufficient computational efficiency and performance for real time, a dedicated numerical implicit time-integration scheme has been developed. Additionally, specific coordinate frames were chosen to efficiently calculate and use the needed Jacobian matrices. Independently from this, Fraunhofer ITWM has developed and installed the new driving simulator RODOS (RObot based Driving and Operation Simulator), which is based on the industrial robot KUKA KR1000.

The tire plays a fundamental role in the generation of acoustically perceptible driving noise and vibrations inside the vehicle. An essential part of these vibrations is induced by the road excitation and transferred via the tire into the vehicle. There are two basic ways to study NVH behavior: Simulations in time and frequency domains. The system can be simulated using a transient simulation method with the disadvantage of high simulation and process turnaround times. Alternatively, a linearization around a stationary state is performed and solved in frequency domain with fast numerical schemes. Modelling the tire transfer behavior in frequency domain requires special attention to the rotation of the tire. This paper shows the approach taken by the authors to include the transfer behavior in the frequency range up to 250 Hz from geometric road excitations to resulting spindle forces in frequency domain. Special care has been used in the modelling of local road excitations.

The aim of this paper is to study in deep the peculiar test-rigs and experimental procedures adopted to the fulfilment of the principal requirements of automotive steel wheels, in particular regarding fatigue damaging. In the discussion, the standard requirements, the OEM specifications and the dimensional and geometric tolerances are approached. As result of an increasingly necessity to improve the performance of the components, innovative virtual test benches are presented. Differently from their traditional precursors, virtual test-rigs give an extended view of the physical behaviour of the component as the possibility to monitor stress-strain distribution in deep. In the first section, the state of the art and the specifications are listed. Secondly, the adopted hardware test-rigs as the experimental tests are described in detail. In the third one, proposed virtual test-rig is discussed.

Rolling resistance and tread wear of tires do particularly influence the maintenance costs of commercial vehicles. Although tire labeling is established in Europe, it is meanwhile well-known that, due to the respective test procedures, these labels do not hold in realistic application scenarios in the field. This circumstance arises from the development phase of tires, where the respective performance properties are mainly evaluated in tire/wheel standalone scenarios in which the wide range of usage variability of commercial vehicles cannot be considered adequately. Within this article we address a method to predict indicators for rolling resistance and tread wear of tires in realistic application scenarios considering application-based factors of influence like specific customers, operation circumstances, regional dependencies, fleet specific characteristics etc. Moreover, the prescribed methodology may also be transferred to the prediction of fuel consumption and pollutant emission.

The full vehicle simulation on durability proving grounds is a well established technique in the development process of passenger car manufacturers. The respective road surfaces are designed to generate representative spindle loads and typically include events that will result in large tire deformations. Depending on manufacturer and the combination of vehicle size and wheel properties, these deformations can be so large that the tire belt and/or sidewall have contact with the rim crown (protected by the tire sidewall). The current tendency to low-aspect ratio tires reduces the available deformation capability of the tire while simultaneously introducing larger nonlinearities in the sidewall behavior. After a short overview of the standard modeling technique used by the CDTire model family to handle such events, a refinement of this technique is introduced, modeling both the non-linearity behavior of the sidewall and a possible subsequent rim contact.

The authors are responsible for the development of a structural 3D shell based bead-to-bead model with sidewalls and belt that separately models all functional layers of a modern tire [4]. In this model, the inflation pressure is modeled as a uniform stress acting normal to the shell’s inner face. The pressure can vary depending on the application: prescribed by the MBS-tool to align to a constant pressure specified for a vehicle or scenario, but it can also be modified dynamically to simulate e.g. a sudden pressure loss in a tire [1]. For many applications, this description of the inflation pressure as a time dependent quantity is sufficient. However, there are applications where it is needed to describe the inflation gas using a dynamic gas equation (Euler or Navier-Stokes). One such example is when the tire model is used in NVH (Noise-Vibration-Harshness) applications where the frequency range extends the 200 Hz range.

Sudden pressure loss can lead to vehicle instability and - without aid of systems such as e.g. Electronic Stability Control (ESC) - to an emergency situation, possibly resulting in an accident. But also with an ESC system such a situation is an unusual (unstandardized) application case, because the vehicle system (car+tires) properties change very rapidly during the sudden pressure loss, which leads to a very high dynamic response in the system and moreover to a very fuzzy and unclear description of the vehicle system. From this point of view, a proper validation and verification of an ESC system for such an application seems to have a high safety relevancy. The authors have set up a simulation case to simulate a sudden tire inflation pressure loss and its consequences to the car stability. Using this simulation setup enables a CAE engineer to pre-develop ESC systems and/or to validate and test these for a realistic and relevant use case.

Today's tire models used in MBD full vehicle application scenarios like Ride&Comfort or Durability are parameterized with a variety of ‘spindle load’ measurements: quasi-static (e.g. vertical, lateral and circumferential stiffness), quasi-steady-state (e.g. pure lateral and longitudinal slip) and transient (e.g. cleat run) tests in well defined tire stand-alone test rigs measure the accumulated tire force acting on the wheel center. While some tests are designed to induce local deformations (e.g. vertical stiffness on cleats), no measurement of local reactions (e.g. sidewall displacement or rim strain) are performed in a standardized way - apart from footprint and contour tests. The level of detail in structural FEA tire models renders them unfeasible for most full vehicle applications due to the implied computational effort; however, dedicated tire stand-alone scenarios are well within reach of today's R&D IT infrastructures.