An Improved Model for Road-Tyre Interaction

Tyres comprise of both rigid and flexible components. Difficulty in judging the flexibility and material properties makes it one of the more difficult-to-model components in the passenger-vehicle-suspension-tyre-road system. Attempts to arrive at a good model have resulted in the need to make a compromise between model capability (prediction accuracy) and modelling complexity. The commercially available FTire model is usually accepted to be the benchmark for prediction accuracy. This work proposes a modelling approach which can give a tyre model of much lower complexity but outperforms the prediction accuracy of FTire. This was achieved by a combination of a version of the rigid ring tyre model and the enveloping model. Thereafter, by a systematic sensitivity analysis, the model was further simplified to arrive at a model of appropriate level of complexity which is almost as good as the original model. This work provides guidelines for development of simple but accurate tyre models which will be easy to integrate with vehicle, suspension and road models.