A Tire/Road Interaction Tool for the Evaluation of Tire Wear for Commercial Vehicles

Abstract

The understanding and control of tire wear, preventing tread degradation and irregular wear has been a challenge to tire product engineers, and an important issue for fleet management. There is not a simple equation to analyze and predict it. The optimal wear, and consequent mileage performance, depends not only on the tire, but also on its interaction with the vehicle and the road. It varies with operational conditions and, furthermore, with vehicle and tire maintenance. This paper aims to show the preliminary analysis useful for the development of a tool able to predict tire wear performances in the truck & bus environment, anticipating the results coming from a standard field evaluation. A predictive tool is important for both tire manufacturer and final customers: the advantage for tire manufacturer is the possibility to drastically reduce time-to-market and to have reliable and controlled results; for OEMs, the possibility to receive tire models based on outdoor tests using their own vehicle as a moving lab; for final customer, the advantage of having smart-tire able to predict wear performances, generating valuable advices for maintenance and fleet control. Such aspects will be explained in this paper covering the first results obtained during an outdoor session where a reference vehicle has been instrumented in order to evaluate longitudinal behavior.