Designing a New Sustainable and Instrumented Tire: ECOTIRE

Despite the enormous potential of tires to provide information on the state of the road for braking, traction or turning; currently they are passive elements, detached from the assistance systems and/or driving automation. Likewise, its manufacture, use and recycling have a significant environmental impact, with the development of alternative materials in its components and improvements related to its life cycle being a priority. For all these reasons, in this paper it is proposed to implement a new concept of mix-tire that allows the use of new materials in the tire case and tread band, and facilitates the installation of sensors, allowing to reduce the environmental impact and at the mean time a better implementation of the intelligent tire. To this end, the possibility of applying surface treatments that increase the useful life of the casing is studied, as well as the use of a purely mechanical connection between the casing and the tread. This new tire concept, which is presented and evaluated in this study, complies with this new structure and serves as proof of concept for subsequent developments: ECOTIRE.