Tyre and Vehicle Dynamics Laboratory

A new laboratory has been built to carry out research and development into the noise, comfort and handling characteristics of pneumatic tyres, and to produce the optimum matching of tyres to vehicles. The vehicles covered range from cars to the largest trucks. The equipment includes rolling roads fitted with various road replica surfaces for noise and comfort testing. Single tyre testing is carried out on laboratory suspension units. Multi-channel real-time analysers are used to process the information from accelerometers and microphones. Special test techniques have been developed to produce the ranking of vibration transmission through the various paths between the road surface and vehicle occupants. For handling evaluation, cornering characteristics of tyres are measured by the Dynamics Machine. These are correlated with proving ground instrumented tests in mathematical simulations; the vehicle characteristics for these are measured on the Vehicle Inertia Rig.