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The cooling performance and the heat resistance performance of commercial vehicle are balanced with aerodynamic performance, output power of powertrain, styling, cost and many other parameters. Therefore, it is desired to predict the cooling performance and the heat resistance performance with high accuracy at the early stage of development. Among the three basic forms of heat transfer (conduction, convection and radiation), solving thermal conduction accurately is difficult, because modeling of “correct shape” and setting of coefficient of thermal conductivity for each material need many of time and efforts at the early stage of development. Correct shape means that each part should be attached correctly to generate the solid mesh with high quality. Therefore, it is more efficient and realistic method to predict the air temperature distribution around the rubber/resin part instead of using the surface temperature at the preliminary design stage.

Running tires are in thermal equilibrium between the generation of internal heat due to the viscoelasticity of the rubber material and the effects of their thermal environment. Since the viscoelasticity shows temperature dependency, there is a strong correlation between this thermal equilibrium and the rolling resistance. However, there are only few methods which can be used for estimating the amount of rolling resistance of an actual running vehicle using this correlation. In this paper, we would like to estimate the temperature distribution in the running tire by means of the quasi-static model of the finite element method (FEM) in consideration of the thermal environment of real road driving and introduce an approach toward estimating the rolling resistance of an actual running vehicle based on the correlation between the temperature distribution in the tire and the rolling resistance.