On Finite Element Tyre Modal Analysis

Three-dimensional (3D) Finite element (FE) tyre models have been widely used for tyre design, vehicle design and dynamic investigations. Such tyre models have the inherent advantage of covering a wide range of tyre modelling issues such as the detailed tyre geometry and material composition, in addition to an extensive coverage of tyre operational conditions such as the static preload, inflation pressure and driving speed. Although tyre vibration behaviour, in different frequency ranges are of general interest, both for the vehicle interior and exterior noise, the present study is limited to a frequency of 100 Hz which is prevalent in most road induced (Noise, Vibration, Harshness) NVH ride and handling problems. This study investigates tyre vibration behaviour using a proprietary FE code. Such investigation plays an important role in the study of vehicle dynamics. In particular, the eigen-pair i.e. the natural frequencies and mode shapes of the tyre in a real eigenvalue analysis for different operational conditions of pressure, pre-load and restraint conditions are extracted and compared with experimental results.