Experimental and numerical investigation of tire tread wear on block level

Abstract

Tread wear appears as a consequence of friction, which mainly depends on surface charac-teristics, contact pressure, slip velocity, temperature and dissipative material properties of the tread material itself. The subsequent description introduces a wear model as a function of the frictional energy rate. A post-processing as well as an adaptive re-meshing algorithm are implemented into a finite element code in order to predict wear loss in terms of mass. The geometry of block models is generated by image processing tools using photographs of the rubber samples in the laboratory. In addition, the worn block shape after the wear test is compared to simulation results.