A real-time physical model for strain-based intelligent tires

In recent years, a large amount of research has been focused on intelligent tire technology. Several systems have been developed based on different sensors installed on tires. Nowadays one of the major research problems for intelligent tire development is how to correlate measurements provided by sensors to the tire dynamics. The methods mostly presented in literature are based on empirical correlations between measurements and tire working conditions obtained with extensive experimental activities which are expensive and time consuming. In this paper, a real-time physical model suitable to describe the longitudinal dynamics of strain-based intelligent tires is described. The mathematical tire model consists of a flexible ring on a viscoelastic foundation. The solution of the model dynamics has been obtained in closed form and the model parameters have been identified from experimental data. The comparison between the simulated strains and the ones provided by an intelligent tire prototype highlighted that the proposed tire model can estimate with an acceptable precision the tire deformations for several operative working conditions