Experimental and numerical study of friction and stiffness characteristics of small rolling tires

Virtual testing is nowadays the standard in the design process of new tires. Besides modeling the static response of the tire itself, the dynamics of a rolling tire in contact with the road needs to be incorporated. Due to the uncontrollable environmental conditions and the complex structure of the tires, it is advantageous to use small-scale testing under more controlled conditions. Experimental characterization of frictional properties of rubber compounds is, however, limited due to the necessity of complex measurement systems. In this paper a commercially available laboratory abrasion and skid tester is used to identify both friction and stiffness characteristics of the same rubber compound. The obtained friction properties are implemented in a finite element model of the setup, and different validation steps are presented. Finally, a steady-state transport approach is used to efficiently compute a steady-state solution, which is compared with the experimental results. The numerical results show a good qualitative agreement with the experimental results