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The automotive and aerospace industries are increasingly using the light-weight material to improve the vehicle performance. However, using light-weight material can increase the airborne and structure-borne noise. A special attention needs to be paid in designing the structures and measuring their dynamics. Conventionally, the structure is excited using an impulse hammer or a mechanical shaker and the response is measured using uniaxial or multi-axial accelerometers to obtain the dynamics of the structure. However, using contact-based transducers can mass load the structure and provide data at a few discrete points. Hence, obtaining the true dynamics of the structure conventionally can be challenging. In the past few years, stereo-photogrammetry and three-dimensional digital image correlation have received special attention in collecting operating data for structural analysis. These non-contact optical techniques provide a wealth of distributed data over the entire structure.

Vehicles are in contact with the road surface through tires, and the interaction at the tire-road interface is usually the major source of vibrations that is experienced by the passengers in the vehicle. Thus, it is critical to measure the vibrational characteristics of the tires in order to improve the safety and comfort of the passengers and also to make the vehicle quieter. The measurement results can also be used to validate numerical models. In this paper, Digital Image Correlation (DIC) as a non-contact technique is used to measure the dynamics of a racing tire in static and rolling conditions. The Kettering University FSAE car is placed on the dynamometer machine for this experiment. A pair of high-speed cameras is used to capture high-resolution images of the tire in a close-up view. The images are processed using DIC to obtain strain and displacement of the sidewall of the tire during rolling. The experiment is performed for various testing speeds.