Indoor Tyre Tread Wear Testing Driven by Outdoor Data Clustering

Wear is becoming a topic of major attention for tyres, affecting also other performances. Therefore, its estimation is of utter importance under several points of view, such as predictive maintenance and vehicle dynamics controllers. Indoor testing is emerging as an alternative way for predicting wear compared to on-road outdoor tests, which nowadays represent the standard methodology. Indoor tests, in fact, are performed in a more controllable environment, reducing testing time and costs. However, several challenges must be faced to reproduce indoor the same wear rate/shape obtained in real on-road working conditions. The present paper focuses one of the critical aspects for indoor testing: the definition of the load cycle to be applied to a tyre, i.e. the time history of forces, slip and angles to be provided as an input to the wear machine. Specifically, a clustering approach able to extract from outdoor data a limited set of manoeuvres representative of a given outdoor wear track is proposed.