Experimental Study of Tread Rubber Compound Effects on Tire Performance on Ice

Mechanical and thermal properties of the rubber compounds of a tire play an important role in the overall performance of the tire when it is in contact with the terrain. Although there are many studies conducted on the properties of the rubber compounds of the tire to improve some of the tire characteristics, such as the wear of the tread, there are a limited number of studies that focused on the performance of the tire when it is in contact with ice. This study is a part of a more comprehensive project looking into the tire-ice performance and modeling.

In this study, to understand the effect of different rubber compounds on the tire performance, three identical tires from the same company have been chosen. The tires’ only difference is the material properties of the rubber. Two approaches have been implemented in this study. For the first approach, several tests were conducted for the chosen tires at Terramechanics, Multibody, and Vehicle Systems (TMVS) laboratory at Virginia Tech to compare their performance experimentally. For the second approach, a tire-ice model has been used to compute the height of the water film created at the contact patch. As will be shown in this study, an increase in the height of water film results in a decrease in the friction coefficient, which is one of the most critical parameters for the tire performance. By having this knowledge, the performance of the three tires considered in the study was compared using the developed tire-ice model, based on the values obtained for the height of the water film. It is shown that the results obtained by simulation coincide with the results obtained experimentally. The results from this study show the sensitivity of the magnitude of the tractive force with respect to parameters such as tire temperature, normal load, etc. The results also indicate that the tire with the lowest value of Young’s modulus has the highest traction among all three tires used in this study.