HOMOLOGATION AND LABELLING PROCESS OF TYRES WITH THE NEW ROLLING RESISTANCE REGULATION: EXPERIENCES AND RESEARCH

摘要

Nowadays, one of the main pillars of research and development inside the automotivernindustry is the way to reduce the CO2 emissions that the vehicle produce when running withrnthe final target of protect the environment. So, the Rolling Resistance assessment and researchrnare two basic issues for the OEM’s and the tyre manufacturers.rnAccording to the EC Regulation 661/2009, which establishes requirements for the typeapprovalrnof newly-manufactured tyres with regard to their safety, rolling resistancernperformance and rolling noise emissions, the EC Regulation 1222/2009 indicates the labellingrnsteps, more restrictive than the ones appearing in the ECE Regulation no117, dividing therntyres type for vehicles and the limit of the RR coefficient. So, national authorities shall refusernto grant new types of tyre which do not comply with this Regulation from 1 November 2012,rnand shall forbid the sale of new tyres for new vehicle of categories M, N and O in 1rnNovember 2016 in the first step of values.rnDue to this labelling, a high precision RR coefficient measure is needed. As shown in the ISOrn28580, four different test methods can be used in order to determinate the Rolling Resistancernof a tyre. Those methods are force, torque, power and deceleration.rnOne of the main issues nowadays being developed is the definition of the European Reference,rncomparing Rolling resistance test results from different tyres in different machines. Thosernmachines must have a high repeatability of results and a maximum acceptable value ofrnmaximum of 0.05 as standard deviation.rnThis paper describes the development process of this new tyre reference machine inside thernfield of Rolling Resistance, with the possibility of doing homologation and labelling tests withrnthe four possible methods, which makes that IDIADA type approval agency gives a completernservice to the tyres manufacturers.rnApplus+ IDIADA and the Applus+ Chair of the Technical University of Catalonia, takingrnadvantage of this new machine, are doing together research activities to achieve a deeperrnknowledge of the rolling resistance. First results obtained show that an interval exists wherernthe rolling resistance coefficient experiments a local minimum value and at lower and higherrnspeed the rolling resistance increases its value. So, if we are talking about the fuelrnconsumption, an interval of speeds exist where the fuel consumption related to the rollingrnresistance is minimum and a point of maximum efficiency.