A Study on the Contact Characteristics of Tires–Roads Based on Pressure-Sensitive Film Technology

Abstract

Tire–road characteristics are a critical focus of research in the automotive and transportation industries. On the one hand, the research can help optimize tires’ structural design; on the other hand, it can analyze the mechanical response of the pavement structure under the vehicle load. In addition, the non-uniformity distribution of the tire ground stress will also have a direct impact on the skid resistance, which determines the driving safety. Due to the limitation of testing technology, the measurement of tire ground pressure was mainly carried out on a flat test platform, ignoring the roughness of the actual pavement surface texture. The tire–road contact characteristics research on the macro-texture and micro-texture of asphalt pavement needs to be broken through. A high-precision pressure-sensitive film measurement system is utilized to examine the actual contact characteristics between two types of automobile tires and three types of asphalt pavement in this paper. The influence law of pavement texture and patterned tires on the contact area and stress was explored, and the concentration effect of tire–road contact stress was evaluated. The results indicate that the contact area of grounding tires exhibits a nearly linear relationship with tire inflation pressure and load. Notably, the change in load has a more significant influence on the contact area than tire inflation pressure. On asphalt pavement, the contact reduction rate decreases by approximately 5–10% for block pattern tires and 10–15% for longitudinal pattern tires. Furthermore, as the texture depth of the pavement increases, the contact area between tires and the pavement texture decreases. The actual tire–road interface experiences significant stress concentration due to the embedding and meshing effects between the tire and road surface. Even on a flat steel surface, the peak stress at the edge of the tread block exceeds the 0.7 MPa design load, which is about 2.5–3 times higher than the design uniform load. The peak stress between the tire and asphalt pavement reaches 4–10 times the design uniform load, with a rising trend as the pavement texture depth increases. This study can provide relevant experimental technical support for tire design and functional design of asphalt pavement.