Aerodynamic Performance of Various Tires with Camber and Toe Angle Variation

A tire is one of the most essential parts of a vehicle that not only helps to provide stability but also helps in isolating shocks from the road surface as well as giving longitudinal and lateral powers for vehicle acceleration, steering, and braking. We are familiar with the tire as a pneumatic tire, but with recent developments, a new category of tires called non-pneumatic tires (NPT) has recently come to light. The unique design equipped for these tires provides them with several advantages over the conventional pneumatic tires, which include the elimination of tire blowouts and elimination of punctures. Since rotating tires are known to contribute up to one-third of the vehicle’s total aerodynamic force [5] and also because of the vast advantages provided by the NPT. The present work aims to investigate the aerodynamic performance of NPT with hexagonal spokes (NPT-HS), NPT with curved spokes (NPT-CS), and a pneumatic tire (PT) using the steady-state Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) method. Using SIMSCALE, a cloud computing simulation platform, a comparative study of the aerodynamic forces acting on these three tires under the different toe and camber angles has been conducted. A comparative study of the flow pattern around the tire is further conducted for all three types of tires under the rotating condition. Due to the complex structure of spokes in NPTs, more counterrotating vortices are formed resulting in much higher drag and lift coefficient values compared to PT.