Finite Element Analysis for Tread Wear of Radial Tire

Finite element analysis plays an important role in studying wear performance in the early stage of tire development. This article developed a finite element analysis method for radial tire tread wear. An 185/60 R14 radial tire is chosen as the research object, whose longitudinal grooved tire model is established in ABAQUS. The correctness of the tire finite element model (FEM) is verified through tire static loading test. The ABAQUS/Explicit method is used to simulate tire rolling process, during which a unified friction model considering pressure and slip velocity is put forward in subroutine VFRIC to describe the complex tread rubber friction behavior under various contact conditions. The modified exponential ARCHARD model is utilized to illustrate the wear volume and wear depth. The updated geometry method is used in wear process adopting subroutine UMESHMOTION, which divides the whole wear analysis distance into several stages in order to enhance the simulation precision. 9 typical working conditions are considered in the simulation, and tire wear behavior of each condition is analyzed. The final total wear behavior is obtained according to the total mileage and the probability of each condition, and the effect of tire wear on braking performance is simulated in Carsim.