The Investigation of a Towed Trailer Test for Passenger Tire Coast-By Noise Measurement

It is difficult to quantify the portion of coasting vehicle noise that is due to tire-pavement interaction alone. There are often contributions from aerodynamic noise of the vehicle, transmission whine, noise from suspension components, and other miscellaneous sources. The towed-trailer method used in the revised SAE J57 standard has been shown to be an effective means of isolating tire-pavement noise for truck tires. This paper reports the results of a test program conducted by SAE Tire Noise Standards Committee to evaluate the feasibility of towed-trailer coast-by testing of passenger and light truck tires.

The results of tests conducted in April 1996 at the Ohio Transportation Research Center are described and they indicate that accurate measurements are possible for towed-trailer testing of passenger tires. It is shown that a key aspect of performing such a test is reducing the noise of the tow vehicle and that sufficient reduction is possible even for extremely quiet test tires.

During the time in which the SAE committee was preparing to conduct this test, the ISO/ TC 31/ WG 3 working group developed a draft trailer test method for evaluating tire noise. This test procedure was also evaluated during the April 1996 testing sequence. The results show the proposed test method to be highly accurate and a viable means for tire noise evaluation.