Experimental Investigation of Tire Dynamic Strain Characteristics for Developing Strain-Based Intelligent Tire System

The increasing demand for ground vehicles safety has led to the requirements for effective and accurate vehicle active safety systems, such as Anti-lock Braking System (ABS) and Traction Control System (TCS). As the only link between vehicle and road, the tire is in a very privileged position in a vehicle to acquire vital information which could be used to improve vehicle dynamics control systems. Hence the requirement for an “intelligent tire” that incorporates a system that is able to sense the tire and road conditions, and then interact with the vehicle dynamics control system to optimize the vehicle performance as well as provide warning information to the driver. In this paper, an experimental tire strain-based system is used to establish the proof of concept of an intelligent tire prototype. This experimental system comprises a data acquisition device and three rectangular rosette strain sensors, which can measure the tire surface dynamic strain in real time. Indoor tire rolling tests including steady state straight line and cornering are used to demonstrate the feasibility of the measuring tire strain history with a view to determining tire dynamic strain characteristics. Tire dynamic strain characteristics are extracted and analyzed with respect to the variation of tire operational conditions, such as inflation pressure, rolling speed and pre-loading. These relationships between dynamic strain characteristics and tire operational conditions indicate potential application of tire strain measurement in estimating tire behavior.