Finite Elements Simulation of Impact in a Passenger Car Tyre 2007-01-2878

The pneumatic tyre is an important component to the vehicle passenger comfort and safety. It is one of the few mechanical structures subjected to large deflections and deformations. It is manufactured with non-linear anisotropic composite materials, being a complex mechanical structure which presents modeling difficulties such as the contact between tyre and roadway and mathematical complications due to rubber incompressibility and hyperelasticity. The tyre works as the interface between vehicles and the road, being designed to support and transmit the forces generated during the vehicle ride. Accelerations, braking, lateral forces, road irregularities and impact, are ordinary dynamic conditions to the pneumatic structures. The behaviour of a passenger car tyre under impact will be simulated and the forces and deformations generated will be acquired in order to analyze its structural response. Understanding the impact phenomena on passenger car tyres is a new possibility of collaboration to virtual product development in order to develop safer tyres.