Thermo-mechanical coupled finite element simulation of tire cornering characteristics-Effect of complex material models and friction law

This research work is devoted to the development of an advanced finite element model for the simulation of a rolling tire under cornering conditions. The main goal of this research is to investigate the effect of material and frictional models complexity on results accuracy. A finite element model based on a coupled thermo-mechanical procedure was developed using Abaqus and two specific in-house user subroutines called as FRIC and UMASFL were written. Simultaneous consideration of real frictional behavior in conjunction with temperature dependent hyper-viscoelastic materials properties was performed. The accuracy of simulations with different complexity levels were checked via comparison between simulation results and the obtained data from a tire tested on a flat-trac machine. The results showed that the frictional heat generation during tire cornering is really complicated and could not be described with available models. Parametric studies revealed that the generated lateral force was not affected considerably by model complexity, but the aligning moment and pressure distribution in footprint area were very sensitive to the model complexity level.