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Most ground vehicles related accidents occur when the friction demand to perform a maneuver with a certain vehicle and tires exceeds the coefficient of friction of the pavement surface. As generally known, the forces and moments acting on the vehicle body are mainly generated at the tire-road surface interface. The common characteristics of tire forces on any surface include a linear region where the forces vary linearly with respect to the relative slip values; and a nonlinear region where the forces saturate and may even start decreasing. The experience of most of the daily drivers on the roads is limited within this linear region where the dynamic behavior of the vehicle remains proportional to the driver’s inputs. Therefore, an unexpected change in tire or surface characteristics (due to a change in surface friction, large driver inputs, etc.) may easily cause the driver to panic and/or to lose his/her ability to maintain a stable vehicle.

Three-dimensional (3D) Finite element (FE) tyre models have been widely used for tyre design, vehicle design and dynamic investigations. Such tyre models have the inherent advantage of covering a wide range of tyre modelling issues such as the detailed tyre geometry and material composition, in addition to an extensive coverage of tyre operational conditions such as the static preload, inflation pressure and driving speed. Although tyre vibration behaviour, in different frequency ranges are of general interest, both for the vehicle interior and exterior noise, the present study is limited to a frequency of 100 Hz which is prevalent in most road induced (Noise, Vibration, Harshness) NVH ride and handling problems. This study investigates tyre vibration behaviour using a proprietary FE code. Such investigation plays an important role in the study of vehicle dynamics.

The development of intelligent tire technology from concept to application covers multi-disciplinary fields. During the course of development, the computational method can play a significant role in understanding tire behavior, assisting in the design of the intelligent tire prototype system and in developing tire parameters estimation algorithm, etc. In this paper, a finite element tire model was adopted for developing a strain-based intelligent tire system. The finite element tire model was created considering the tire's composite structure and nonlinear properties of its constituent materials, and the FE model was also validated by physical tests. The FE model is used to study tire strain characteristics by steady state simulation for straight line rolling, traction and braking, as well as cornering. Tire loading conditions were estimated by feature extraction and data fitting.

The increasing demand of energy use in transportation systems combined with the limited supply of fossil hydrocarbons to support conventional engines has led to a strong resurgence in interest for electric vehicles (EVs). Although EVs offer the possibility of decoupling the issue of energy source from the primary torque generator in an automobile, the current technology is yet to match the well-developed internal combustion (IC) systems, especially in terms of energy capacity and travel range. In this study, the influence of rolling-resistance on the energy efficiency and road holding of electric vehicles is investigated. Rolling resistance is taken in the context of energy loss (e.g. the mechanical energy converted into other sources of energy) for a unit distance traveled by the tire.

Sloped medians provide a run-off area for errant vehicles so that they can be safely stopped off-road with or without barriers placed in the sloped median. However, in order to optimize the design of sloped medians and the containment barriers, it is essential to accurately model the behavior of vehicles on such sloped terrain surfaces. In this study, models of a vehicle fleet comprising a small sedan and a pickup truck and sloped terrain surface are developed in CarSim™ to simulate errant vehicle behavior on sloped median. Full-scale crash tests were conducted using the vehicle fleet driven across a 9.754 meters wide median with a 6:1 slope at speeds ranging from 30 to 70 km/h. Measured data such as the lateral accelerations of the vehicle as well as chassis rotations (roll and pitch) were synchronized with the vehicle motion obtained from the video data.

The increasing demand for ground vehicles safety has led to the requirements for effective and accurate vehicle active safety systems, such as Anti-lock Braking System (ABS) and Traction Control System (TCS). As the only link between vehicle and road, the tire is in a very privileged position in a vehicle to acquire vital information which could be used to improve vehicle dynamics control systems. Hence the requirement for an “intelligent tire” that incorporates a system that is able to sense the tire and road conditions, and then interact with the vehicle dynamics control system to optimize the vehicle performance as well as provide warning information to the driver. In this paper, an experimental tire strain-based system is used to establish the proof of concept of an intelligent tire prototype. This experimental system comprises a data acquisition device and three rectangular rosette strain sensors, which can measure the tire surface dynamic strain in real time.

The use of accurate tire material properties is a major requirement for conducting a successful tire analysis using finite element method (FEM). Obtaining these material properties however poses a major challenge for tire modelers and researchers due to the complex nature of tire material and associated proprietary protections of constituent material properties by tire manufactures. In view of this limitation, a simple and effective procedure for generating tire materials data used in tire finite element analysis (FEA) is presented in this paper. All the tire test specimens were extracted from a tire product based on special considerations such as specimen dimension and shape, test standard, precondition of specimen and test condition for cords. The required material properties of tire rubber component, including hyperelasticity and viscoelasticity were obtained using simple uni-axial tension test.