Tire Society Takeaways 2021

Image of a TireThe Tire Society held its 40th annual meeting last month with the theme The Virtual Tire.  It has always been the place to see up and coming ideas, to see who is pushing into the frontiers of the field, and to renew professional connections across the industry.  Endurica was very proud to sponsor this year.

Here’s a brief recap of our favorite talks…

GM LogoGM’s Mike Anderson, Executive Director of Global Virtual Design, Development and Validation, kicked off the meeting with his keynote lecture, titled “The Move To Virtual”.  He spoke of GM’s target to achieve 100% virtual design by 2025.  Anderson explained that this doesn’t mean that physical testing will go away, but rather that GM is dead serious about getting to a “right the first time” scenario rather than a “discover and recover” mode.  “It’s a measure twice, cut once” culture, he said.  He noted that upstart competitors are sprinting ahead in areas like EVs through the use of simulation and that the speed of discovery has increased significantly in the current competitive environment.  Simulation drives learning speed, not only because of the opportunity to get engineering answers at the pre-build phase but also because it enables exploration of more of the design space and more of the performance outcomes.  He told the conference that “we need to go beyond just replicating physical tests with simulation, we need to leverage the strength of simulation to go beyond test”.  In the Q&A, Anderson was asked whether suppliers will also be expected to be virtual.  “That’s gonna be tough to play together” for rubber part suppliers that can’t engage via simulation.

There were three talks given by Endurica users at this year’s Tire Society meeting.

Maxxis Tires LogoPooya Behroozinia of Maxxis Tires spoke on “Tire Durability Prediction Using Three-Element Layered Mesh for Cord-Rubber Composites”.  Behroozinia shared a tire meshing technique for improving representation of interlaminar shearing in their tire model.  They used Endurica DT to simulate the damage accruing across all of the 6 steps in a stepped-up load durability test, and they were able to predict correctly the lower sidewall failure mode, the life (45 hours observed, 38 hours predicted), and the crack orientation.  They also had a 2nd validation case in which the loads were increased by 10% in all steps of the test.  The simulation again predicted correct failure, and the comparison of experimental life (41000 km) to simulated life (36330 km) was in good agreement.

CEAT LogoVidit Bansal of CEAT spoke on “Incremental, Critical Plane Analysis and Experimental Verification for TBR Tyre Bead Endurance Applications”.  Similar to the Maxxis paper, CEAT used Endurica DT to simulate a multi-step durability test with loads ranging from 80% to 250%.  In this paper, two different truck tire sizes were modeled and tested, a 10.00R20 and an 11.00R20.  The analysis correctly predicted the ply turnup as the critical location.  The predicted lives of the two tire sizes were predicted at 90-93% of the actual tested life in both cases.

Goodyear LogoTom Ebbott and Gobi Gobinath of Goodyear spoke on “A Model for Predicting Residual Casing Life of a Tire Following an Impact Event”.  This work demonstrated the consequences on tire damage development of a range of impact event scenarios (3 speeds, 4 impact angles, 3 different wear states) early in the life of the tire.  It used Endurica DT to accrue damage from both the impact event (computed with explicit FEA) and subsequent tire runout under steady state rolling conditions (computed with implicit FEA).  The crack growth rate curve during the impact was based upon experimental measurements of the critical tearing energy at impact rates.  When asked about experimental validation of the simulation results during the Q&A, Ebbott noted that “the modeling work stands on its own – it is based on sound physics”.

We at Endurica were delighted with the significance and innovation on display in all of these talks.  We have often been challenged to show validation for tire durability predictions, but such measurements are difficult to obtain without significant tire testing resources. So, the fact that the Maxxis and CEAT papers showed multiple direct comparisons of tire durability tests with simulations, and the fact that excellent predictions of both failure mode and tire life were achieved was a very significant moment for us and for the industry.

The Goodyear paper was significant for a different reason.  Their paper showed an application that would have been difficult or impossible to evaluate with physical testing.  They showed how getting the right physics into the model builds the trust necessary to leverage simulation to increase the speed and scope of discovery and to go beyond the limits of physical testing.  It was the perfect illustration of keynoter Mike Anderson’s point that simulation opens significant opportunities for competitive advantage and ‘right the first time’ engineering.

Click here to download a .pdf summary of this blog post: Endurica Spotlight on The Tire Society 2021 Annual Meeting The Virtual Tire

 

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Tire Society 2017 – Best Question

Best Question Answer | 56.8 C - Peak temperature | N = 3.8E7 cycles = 131E3 km Cycles to 1 mm Crack

Every year, the top minds from academia, government and industry gather in Akron to share their work at the Tire Society annual meeting, and to enjoy a few moments of professional camaraderie.  Then we all return to fight for another year in the trenches of the technology wars of our employers.

This year, the meeting offered the latest on perennial themes: modal analysis, traction, materials science, noise, simulation, wear, experimental techniques for material characterization and for model validation.  Too much to summarize with any depth in a blog post.  If you are interested, you should definitely resolve to go next year.  Endurica presented two papers this year.

I presented a demonstration of how the Endurica CL fatigue solver can account for the effects of self-heating on durability in a rolling tire.  Endurica CL computes dissipation using a simple microsphere model that is compatible, in terms of discretization of the shared microsphere search/integration domain, with the critical plane search used for fatigue analysis.  In addition to defining dissipative properties of the rubber, the user defines the temperature sensitivity of the fatigue crack growth rate law when setting up the tire analysis.  In the case considered, a 57 degC temperature rise was estimated, which decreased the fatigue life of the belt edge by a factor of nearly two, relative to the life at 23 degC.  The failure mode was predicted at the belt edges.  For 100% rated load, straight ahead rolling, the tire was computed to have a life of 131000 km.

The best audience question was theoretical in nature: are the dissipation rates and fatigue lives computed by Endurica objective under a coordinate system change?  And how do we know?  The short answer is that the microsphere / critical plane algorithm, properly implemented, guarantees objectivity.  It is a simple matter to test: we can compute the dissipation and fatigue life for the same strain history reported in two different coordinate systems.  The dissipation rate and the fatigue life should not depend on which coordinate system is used to give the strain history.

For the record, I give here the full Endurica input (PCO.hfi) and output (PCO.hfo) files for our objectivity benchmark.  In this benchmark, histories 11 and 12 give the same simple tension loading history in two different coordinate systems.  Likewise, 21 and 22 give a planar tension history in two coordinate systems.  Finally, 31 and 32 give a biaxial tension history in two coordinate systems.  Note that all of the strain histories are defined in the **HISTORY section of the .hfi file.  In all cases, the strains are given as 6 components of the nominal strain tensor, in the order 11, 22, 33, 12, 23, 31.  The shear strains are given as engineering shear components, not tensor (2*tensor shear = engineering shear).

The objectivity test is successful in all cases because, as shown in the output file PCO.hfo, both the fatigue life, and the hysteresis, show the same values under a coordinate system change.  Quod Erat Demonstrondum.

ObjectivityTable

the full Endurica input (PCO.hfi) and output (PCO.hfo) files for the objectivity benchmark

 

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