Prediction of Uneven Tire Wear Using Wear Progress Simulation

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.