Development and Validation of a Method for Approximating Road Surface Texture-Induced Contact Pressure in Tire-Pavement Interaction

Abstract

In tire-pavement interaction, road surface texture is an important variable that influences many properties such as tire noise, skid resistance, vehicle performance, and rolling resistance. Efforts to understand and quantify these texture effects have been limited by difficulties in experimentally and theoretically determining the many individual contact areas and contact pressures produced by irregularly-shaped asperities indenting the tire tread. The numerical method developed here to approximate the contact information is based on classical two-dimensional (2D) contact theory. The purpose of this paper is to describe this development. The method computes information on texture-induced contact pressure and length. The required inputs are 2D road surface texture data, tread rubber modulus, and tire inflation pressure. The approximated contact information is used to characterize road surfaces and advance understanding of how their textures affect tire-pavement interaction.