An Analytical Model of Dissipated Viscous and Hysteretic Energy due to Interaction Forces in a Pneumatic Tire: Theory and Experiments

When in use, a tire dissipates energy according to various mechanisms: rolling resistance, viscosity, hysteresis, friction energy, etc. This dissipation of energy contributes to influen- cing tire temperature, contact conditions and the resulting friction coefficient. This research project deals with viscoelastic and hysteretic mechanisms, and presents an explicit expression of the energy dissipated by tire–road interactions caused by these mechanisms. It is based on the Dahl model with regard to the hysteretic force together with a spring and a frequency variable damping coefficient with regard to the viscoelastic one. The energy expression found in this way can be used in tire thermal models to determine one of the heat flows needed to estimate the contact temperature and to find out the actual friction coefficient to be used in real time tire–road interaction models Experimental tests were carried out, for longitudinal interaction only, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed expression by identifying the parameters and validating the results.