THE BRAKING PERFORMANCE OF TYRE-CHAIN ON SNOW COVERED ROAD

摘要

The tyre-chain is utilized to improve the braking performance when vehicles, especially the freight cars, travel on snow covered road. Despite of frequent use of the tyre-chain, few studies investigated the braking performance of tyrechain on snow. In order to reveal the mechanism of braking of the tyre-chain, three different tyre-chains involved in this study were a normal tyre-chain made by steel chain, a custom tyre-chain made by steel wire and a rubber tyre-chain respectively. We installed three types tyre-chains on a model car and tested the braking performance on two typical snow covered roads, namely, a hard one with snow compacted by vehicles and another one covered by sandy snow. A bare tyre without tyre-chain was provided as a reference. The braking distance was measured under 30km/h. In addition, the high-speed cameras and the SIMI motion analysis system were operated to obtain the detailed interaction between tyre-chain and snow. The results showed that tyre-chains could obviously improve the braking performance of the model car. The normal tyre-chain, the rubber tyre-chain and the wire tyre-chain respectively reduced the braking distance of 27%, 32% and 34% on compacted snow and 20%, 20% and 26% on sandy snow.