A discretized contact patch to model tire-road interaction for vehicle dynamic simulation

摘要

This work deals with the problem of determining the tire-road interaction forces for vehicle dynamic simulations. The work is an attempt to develope a numerical scheme that is universally applicable to all possible running conditions. The tire-road contact patch is approximated as a two-dimensional array of nodal points. Properties such as distribution of normal pressure, deflection and stresses over the contact patch are expressed as sets of the respective nodal values rather than analytical functions. Such a representation enables the treatment of any arbitrary, two-dimensional variation of contact patch properties. The representation of non-rectangular contact patch shapes and trapezoidal pressure distributions is also discussed. For steady state running conditions the performance of the scheme is compared with that of an existing analytical model. The applicability of the scheme to transient running conditions is also shown.