A Multibody Approach to Modeling Tire Longitudinal and Lateral Flexibility

A tire longitudinal and lateral flexibility model has been developed which shows considerable advantages over the other available models or methods. Most of the available methods indirectly considers tire lateral flexibility effect by the inclusion of a time-lag function, whereas the developed model is a multibody representation of a wheel/tire subsystem so that the resultant dynamics are similar to those of an actual physical system. Sample simulations with a realistic three-dimensional vehicle model show the effectiveness of the developed model.