Improved Tire Tread Patterns for Reduced Interaction with Road Rain Grooves

摘要

Road rain grooves, nominally 1/8-inch wide at 3/4-inch spacings, are commonly implemented on concrete public highways to improve the wet traction performance of vehicles. The grooves are placed either laterally (transverse to traffic flow) or longitudinally (aligned with traffic flow) along the highway. Unintended disturbances can be detected while operating vehicles on these roads during wet or dry conditions. Sporadic low frequency vehicular lateral motions can arise from longitudinal orientation of the grooves. These lateral motions, in turn, are created by tire forces as features of the tire tread pattern interact with the spacing features of the road rain grooves. It is therefore advantageous to incorporate tread patterns of tires reducing these tendencies. Since the critical features of the tread pattern and the road grooves involve the proximate edge alignment of tread grooves and road grooves, it is advantageous that the tread groove pattern exhibits lateral "dithering" along the circumference of the tire such that the progression of rolling increments of the tire yields only interrupted alignment regions within the contact zone of the tire and road as shown in Fig 1 below. Additional advantage is achieved by reducing the variation in "Net-to-Gross" (ratio of rubber to void contact of the tire-road interface), across the crown of the tire, at narrowly spaced cylindrical regions of the tread at spacings of approximately 0.05" (Fig 2 below).