This study presents the comparison of vehicle handling performance results obtained using physical test tire data and a tire model developed by means of Finite Element Method.
Real tires have been measured in laboratory to obtain the tire force and moment curves in terms of lateral force and align torque as function of tire slip angle and vertical force. The same tire construction has been modeled with Finite Element Method and explicit formulation to generate the force and moment response curves.
Pacejka Magic Formula tire response models were then created to represent these curves from both physical and virtual tires. In the sequence, these tire response models were integrated into a virtual multibody vehicle model developed to assess handling maneuvers.
Finally, results were generated for key vehicle level handling metrics such as roll gradient, understeer gradient and maximum lateral acceleration, allowing the comparative assessment of these metrics using physical and virtual tire data.
