Modeling tire/road contact using piecewise Ritz procedure

Based on the Reddy's higher order refined shear deformation shell, a piecewise Ritz type numerical scheme is presented for the analysis of the tire/road interactions. Both the geometry and the displacement fields of the inner surface of reference of the tire are described by Bezier polynomials. c0 and c1 continuities are imposed on common boundaries between surface patches. The contact constraints, including force constraints and displacement constraints, are directly enforced into the governing equations to reduce the number of unknown variables. From the numerical examples, it is shown that the footprint shape and the stress distribution in the belts predicted by the present method are very close to the results by the finite element method while less unknown variables are in use.