Deflection and contact characteristics of a wide-base tyre on the pavement

摘要

The pursuit of increased efficiency and economy by the trucking industry has led to the increasing use of wide-base tyres that are subjected to higher inflation pressure and heavier truck loadings. In evaluating the structural adequacy of pavements to sustain the applied wheel loads, this paper presents a finite element method to estimate the deflection and contact characteristics of a wide-base tyre on a rigid pavement under static load, focusing on nonlinear material, geometric and contact problems. The computed model is qualitatively compared with the experimental data to examine its validity. It is concluded that both inflation pressure and static load play an important role in the tyre-pavement interaction process. Analysis results provide reliable predictions for vertical inflation, contact patch area and stress distribution of the wide-base tyre under different inflation pressures and loads and a better approximation of the effects of non-uniform tyre contact stresses on rigid pavement response variables is achieved.