Integration of SEA Tire Model with Vehicle Model

Statistical energy analysis (SEA) has recently emerged as an effective tool for design assessment in the automotive industry. Automotive OEM companies develop vehicle models to aid design of body and chassis systems. The tire and wheel suppliers develop and supply component models to OEM companies in the engineering stage. In the model development process, some information on the vehicle side or component side is necessary for model development and correlation. A suitable termination representation of the vehicle characteristics on the tire/wheel model is required. This termination should account for the dissipation of energy on vehicle body and chassis side, otherwise the component model will overestimate the vibration responses and energy levels. On the vehicle model side, a representative simplified tire/wheel model may be sufficient for full vehicle road noise simulation. A small number of subsystems with properties derived from detailed tire/wheel SEA model can effectively represent the dynamics of tire/wheel. This simplified model should have the capability of exciting the vehicle model with different loadcases. In this paper, the techniques on the representation of vehicle in the tire model and the representation of tire/wheel in the vehicle model are discussed.