PREDICTION OF TYRE TREAD WEAR LIFE

Abstract

The major sources of tread wear of a passenger car tyre are the cornering forces developed at the tyre road contact patch. Gough stiffness or tread breaker band stiffness of a tyre is the most important factor which determines this cornering wear. Certain improvements such as accounting for the circumferential tension in the tread breaker due to inflation pressure, and the inclusion of stiffness of sidewalls, over the original simple beam model for the tyre road contact patch, were made in the present work, in the formulation of Gough stiffness model. Using the correlation of Daniels, the effect of different tyre constructional parameters such as bias angle, crown angle, number of cords per decimeter, on tread wear life was discussed. The theoretical calculations of Gough stiffness were verified experimentally for a 5.2-14 bias belted Nylon tyre.