Effect of truck tyre tread design on tyre-terrain interaction using advanced computational techniques

This paper investigates the effect of various tread design parameters on tyre-terrain interaction characteristics. The off-road terrain chosen for this study is varied moisture content sand. The sand terrain was modelled and designed using the smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) technique, calibrated using measured terrain data. The truck tyre used in this research is a 315/80R22.5 tyre, designed and validated through finite element analysis (FEA). The tread of the 3-groove base model tyre is modified with 4-grooves, 5-grooves, half depth, and quarter depth to study the impact of the number of grooves and tread depth on the tyre-terrain interaction characteristics. To study this impact, variations of tyre loading and tyre speed were simulated over different terrains. The tyre-terrain interaction characteristics studied include rolling friction, tyre vertical displacement, and longitudinal slip.