Inclusion of Tire Lifting Effect in Traffic Simulation of a Commercial Load Carrying Vehicle

This work presents a methodology to take into account the effect of tire lifting in the numerical simulation of a commercial vehicle b-train. Firt, the basic equations of the vertical dynamics are showed, followed by the modifications suggested to be included into an existing numerical model of the vehicle (which does not consider the effect). Then, the use of the contact function of commercial software is explained for the tire lifting situation. A study is carried out for the simplified problem of a single wheel running on idealized surfaces. Once the correctness of the approach was asserted, the road obstacle benchmark was used to compare the results of both approaches in a full vehicle numerical simulation. The numerical results obtained with the inclusion of the tire/road separation agreed favorably to the available experimental results, what was demonstrated with graphical comparisons.