The rolling or squeezing noise often originates from contact forces between two solids. This paper deals with the numerical study of frictionless viscoelastic contact between a tire and a road. The presented macro-scale approach takes into account both the viscoelastic behavior of the tire and the roughness of the road surface by solving the contact problem between a rigid rough multi-indenter surface and a viscoelastic half-space. The method relies on the fact that a viscoelastic solution can be reduced instantaneously to an elastic one. A simplified description of viscoelastic material behavior by a rheological model is used and the viscoelastic contact law is linearised to get a system of linear equations. Then the numerical evaluation of tire/road contact forces for different road textures is compared to elastic prints in order to assess the viscoelastic effect. It has been observed that the multi-asperity method can provide tire/road contact forces with a rather good accuracy and a drastically reduced computation time in comparison with classical methods. We believe that the viscoelastic contact model presented here is useful for predicting the vibration and the noise from the tire behavior and the road texture.
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