Constitutive rubber model suitable for rolling resistance simulations of truck tyres

Abstract

Tyres are a vital vehicle component forming an interface between a vehicle and the road, enabling the generation of braking, steering and traction forces. However, they also generate rolling resistance which researchers have tried to minimise through the years for environmental and economic reasons. Despite numerous attempts to model rolling resistance of tyres there still does not seem to exist a simple, flexible and accepted way of modelling rolling resistance in the time domain as well as parametrising models in an easy and accessible way. This study explores a simple and intuitive way of parametrising a hyperviscoplastic parallel rheological framework. In the experimental part of this study, rubber samples with various amounts of carbon black filler are extracted from a truck tyre section and tested using dynamic mechanical analysis. The test data was used to parametrise the material model. The model consists of Mooney-Rivlin hyperelasticity, 40 Prony elements and 8 perfectly plastic elements with Ogden hyperelasticity. The paper introduces a method to obtain a large number of parameters using only six tuneable parameters, which simplifies the tuning of the model drastically. The parametrised model is suitable for tyre rolling resistance simulations with frequency and strain amplitude dependency of the storage and loss modulus. A wide range of strain amplitudes and frequencies can be covered with the proposed method and it is possible to achieve a good fit for the storage and loss modulus values with the benefit of only a few tuneable parameters. Additional Prony or plastic networks do not increase the amount of tuneable parameters. Moreover, the method can be used to parametrise the material using manual iterations which is generally not possible for a parallel rheological framework with such a large amount of parameters.

Modelling of Truck Tire–Rim Slip on Sandy Loam Using Advanced Computational Techniques

“…Of particular relevance for the present research is previous FEA work on the tirerim interaction. This is a relatively under-researched area of tire modelling, and to the authors' knowledge, there have been fewer published developments in this area compared to others, such as rubber materials [15,16] or tire-road friction [17,18]. One reason for the low number of publications is that in most driving conditions, the likelihood and influence of tire-rim slip is low, assuming that the tires are properly mounted and inflated; thus, it is computationally expedient to assume a rigid connection and focus the simulation resources on other, more relevant parts of the tire model.…”

Enhanced Vehicle Performance Through Nonlinear Finite Element Analysis of Tyre-Soil Interaction

“…Rubber, indispensable to tire construction and noted for its complexity, has been reported to be susceptible to deterioration under suboptimal conditions, and its incompressible nature has been observed to pose modelling challenges when utilising conventional finite element methods. Accommodation of the non-linear behaviour of rubber has been achieved through the implementation of strain energy functions, with the selection between Neo-Hookean and Mooney-Rivlin contingent upon the complexity of the application [7][8][9][10][11][12][13].…”