Recently, in the automotive industry the usage of CAE models in the development of a product has grown significantly. Virtual models allow the auto makers to speed up the programs and also to predict desired characteristics of the product.
However in order to build up a reliable model, capable to reproduce in a detailed manner maneuvers done subjectively, a solid procedure to validate the model as well as a robust tire modeling are required. Once with a model validated, detailed enough at suspension, steering and other sub-systems level, all others sources of variation must come from the tire model. And at this moment, properties of the kind of tire modeling can be pointed out.
This work shows one approach to have a good validation of a CAE model at sub-systems level and mainly, discuss the properties and limitations of different tire modeling for different maneuvers, including Pacjeka 94, B-Spline and Delft. The tire model is built up from measurements of the sample to be used on a Flat Trac machine, and the Pacjeka 94 formulation is used as a base formulation for some of the models tested. Results obtained from measurements in prototypes doing maneuvers are compared with simulation.
Different categories of vehicle were tested (SUV, medium size vehicle and pickup) in order to evaluate different scenarios for the tire models. Some properties of the tire models are identified, and a non-linear phenomenon of surface influence on the cornering force and a lack of representation of the CAE model on transient behavior were detected. As a conclusion, this work presents a proposal to improve the tire model for these two phenomena and indicated which tire model is more suitable for each dynamic maneuver.