Modeling of Tire-Obstacle Contact with Focus on Calculation Accuracy and Efficiency 2021-01-0326

Tire model is one of the most significant components of vehicle ride and durability simulation. A balance of calculation accuracy and computational efficiency is always desired in the modeling work. This paper proposes a new discrete ring model for the characterization of the tire enveloping properties. Two modeling concepts are put forward: assuming a stationary tire loaded on a moving road. In this case, the contact interactions can be treated with a tread arc instead of a complete circular. The second operation is decoupling the grid discretization of the tire structure. A higher number of the discrete units at the pre-contact area convinces the calculation results. The discrete elements are relatively sparsely distributed at the non-contact region, which guarantees a competitive time consumption. In this paper, the simulations are validated with the measurements of different operational conditions. The required CPU time is compared to the consumption of the Tandem-cam enveloping model. In the meantime, tire physical features are considered in the parameterization process. Experimental acquisitions of the model parameters include measurement of tire cross-sectional geometry, compression and shear tests of material blocks. For the simulation of transient events, a hybrid method is employed by integrating the proposed discrete model with the rigid ring model. In the end, two application cases for tire impact and vehicle ride simulations are presented.