The damage that occurs around the tire bead region is one of the critical failure forms of a tire. Generally, the prediction of tire durability is carried out by the experimental method. However, it takes a lot of money and time to conduct experiments. Therefore, to determine the fatigue life of radial tire bead, a reasonable prediction method is proposed in this paper. Fatigue testing of bead rubber compounds to determine the ΔSED-number of the cycle (N_f) was applied. The maximum strain energy density range (ΔSED_max) of several bead compounds was obtained by steady-state rolling analysis with a finite element method. This quantity is then inserted into a fatigue life equation to estimate the fatigue life. The experimental results of the 175/75R14 tire were compared with the estimated value, which showed a good correlation. It is concluded that the method can be effectively applied to the fatigue life prediction of the tire bead.

Wear and mileage performance are the foremost performances for truck bus radial (TBR) tires. There are a lot of researches about the tire wear performance as well as the contact patch phenomenon by using finite element analysis (FEA) method or testing. But there is little published data on the correlations between the footprint geometry and the tread wear performance of tires. In this paper, an experiment on tire-ground performance of TBR tires is carried out by using Tekscan. The real-time changes of contact-area pressure distribution that occurred during the process of continuous load and unload are recorded. Three types of tires that act differently in behavior under normal usage are analyzed. A new method of researching in tire tread wear, which focuses on the geometrical characters of the footprint, is put forward. The experimental results of the three tires are described by using footprint geometrical characters. On the basis of studying the changing laws of footprint geometrical characters during the loading process and considering consumer survey and factory feedback information, the correlations between the geometrical character of footprints and tread destruction form are built. The analyzed results show that a greater contact area coefficient and a steady coefficient of contact result in a better wear performance for TBR tires. The footprint-shape coefficient changing laws in the process of loading are found to have a very good coincidence with the tread wear of the three types of tires. Tires with a smaller footprint-shape coefficient are likely to have an average tread wear while avoiding the shoulder wear first. The proposed research provides a new solution to predict tire-ground performance at the point of footprint and several useful references for improving tire design.

Tyre wet skid resistance greatly affects vehicle safety, and it is dependent on the frictional behaviour at the tyre–road interface; however, the currently available numerical models, using the finite element method, either neglect the road roughness or obtain the rightness using expensive computed tomography scans, rendering them inefficient and complex. This study aims to present an estimation method of rubber slides on a rough road, to study tyre wet skid resistance. A three-dimensional rough road model was established, using the harmonic superposition method; the sealing effect of the water film on a wet road was modelled in terms of the pseudo-hydrodynamic bearing effect; the contact pressure, hysteresis friction, and water film hydrodynamic lift force were calculated. Subsequently, a friction model was established that accounted for the road surface morphology, tyre properties, sliding speed, and contact pressure. The accuracy of the friction model was experimentally validated, using the published experimental results. The friction model was then adopted, to conduct a study of the wet skid resistance of a 205/55R16 tyre with two different tread patterns. The simulation results were consistent with the experimental results of braking distance on a wet road. Finally, the effects of road roughness, tread rubber, load, and inflation pressure on wet skid resistance were carried out and analysed. The works in this paper have important significance and practical value for the development of high-performance tyres.

With the development of electric vehicles, more attention has been paid to the role of the driving cycle in vehicle performance testing. At present, the K-means algorithm is often used in the development of driving cycles. However, it is sensitive to the outlier points and also difficult to determine the K value. To solve this problem, the hierarchical cluster method is applied in this study. First, the real-world driving data are collected and denoised through wavelet domain denoising. Then, the data are divided into micro-trips and the characteristic parameters are extracted. The hierarchical cluster method is adopted to classify the micro-trips into different categories. An appropriate number of micro-trips are selected from each group in proportion to each category to assemble the driving cycle. Finally, both the economic simulation and the statistical analysis prove the accuracy of the generated driving cycle and the feasibility of the development method proposed in this paper.