Factors that Impact on Tire Structure Useful Life 2017-36-0121

This work describes a statistic analysis of the service life of tires applied in off-highway trucks used in open-pit mining. Understanding the process of occurrence of structural failures, correlated to the fatigue mechanism and often observed in mechanic components, is of vital importance for the current industry. Since these failures usually happen suddenly, understanding them in the most diverse components submitted to cyclic loads helps analyzing the material’s progressive deterioration along time; it acts as a return to potential improvements in the product, giving feedback of computing simulation data; and it potentially increases operational safety by mitigating the consequences it has on the productive process and on the people exposed to such failures. The tires, components that integrate great part of the on wheels vehicles fleet - amongst them: transportation equipment, industrial mobile equipment and mining equipment - are inserted in this context. Off-highway trucks commonly used in the mining industry, which are also equipped with tires, are submitted to cyclical efforts due to their own operational conditions. These trucks have remote monitoring systems that register and store monitored data through several sensors embedded in these machines. With the help of specialist systems such as telemetry, it was possible to acquire and treat all the data collected in the field, during the vehicles’ normal operation. Based in this data a statistical approach, supported on multiple linear regression analysis, was develop to make previsions. Furthermore, a failure modes analysis correlates the most susceptible areas to structural failures on the tires when it is used for open-pit mining.