Durability evaluation and simulation of oven aged tires

Abstract

Tire durability has been an essential part of passenger and vehicle safety, which usually requires years of road services to test relevant performance. The tire oven aging test has been widely accepted as an accelerated laboratory test to induce large thermal oxidation of rubber compounds with mechanical degradations under high temperatures. Then, the oven-aged tires are tested on rolling drums to compare the durability hours and failure locations. As an assembly of various components with different structures and formulations, tire aging and durability tests are complicated issues incorporating oxygen permeation, consumption, and mechanical degradation. Therefore, it calls for a predictive workflow and model to evaluate the oven aging extent and corresponding durability performance. Based on the computed local oxygen consumption of tires, this article assigns the aged property to each element in a tire FEA (Finite Element Analysis) model by building the quantitative correlations between compound oxygen consumption and degraded mechanical properties. Subsequently, tire mechanics simulations are conducted with SEDG (Strain Energy Density Gradient) to evaluate and compare the endurance of oven-aged tires with different inner liner structures and formulations.