Research on Tire Lateral Force Prediction under High-Load Condition

The tire lateral force is essential to the vehicle handling and stability under cornering. However, it is difficult for engineers to get the tire lateral force under high loading condition due to the limitation of loading ability for most tire test machine in the world. The widely used semi-empirical tire lateral force models are obtained by curve-fitting experiments data and thus unable to predict the load dependent lateral force. The objective of this paper is to predict the tire lateral force under high-load condition based on the low-load tire data.

The nonlinear characteristics of the tire cornering stiffness with the load are greatly affected by the tire carcass compliance. In this paper, a theoretical tire lateral model was built by considering carcass complex deformation. Combined with the relationship between the half-length of the tire contact patch and the load, the non-linear characteristics of the tire cornering stiffness with load were obtained. So the tire lateral force in the linear range under high-load condition was captured. As for the nonlinear range, the tire lateral force under high-load condition was acquired by deriving an empirical friction model dependent on load and slip velocity. The low-load tire test data was used to estimate model parameters. The lateral force prediction accuracy was verified by the high-load tire test data.