Abstract
The tread pattern of a tire has an important effect on tire performances such as handling, wear, noise, hydroplaning and so on. However, a finite element analysis of a patterned tire with detailed tread blocks has been limited owing to the complexity of making meshes for tread blocks and the huge computation time. The computation time has been shortened due to the advance in the computer technology. The modeling of tread blocks usually requires creating a solid model using a CAD software. Therefore it is a very complicated and time-consuming job to generate meshes of a patterned tire using a CAD model. A new efficient and convenient method for generating meshes of a patterned tire has been developed. In this method, 3-D meshes of tread pattern are created by mapping 2-D meshes of tread geometry onto 3-D tread surfaces and extruding them through tread depth. Then, the tread pattern meshes are assembled with the tire body meshes by the tie contact constraint. Residual aligning torque and frictional energy are calculated by using a patterned tire model and compared to the experimental results. It is shown that the calculated results of a patterned tire model are in a good agreement with the experimental ones.
