Tires are made of rubber composites which consist of several plies. Each ply consists of a thin layer of rubber matrix reinforced with unidirectional steel or polyester cords. The deformation and stress analysis of reinforced tires is very difficult b...
Tires are made of rubber composites which consist of several plies. Each ply consists of a thin layer of rubber matrix reinforced with unidirectional steel or polyester cords. The deformation and stress analysis of reinforced tires is very difficult because of the material properties and complexity of tire composites.
In the present work, the tire inflation and contact problem has been solved by the finite element method in which overcome the complexity of tire composites.
The finite element formulation is derived from the equilibrium equations by the principle of virtual work, and the constitutive equation given by the rubber material characteristics. Also, a contact formulation is added to the finite element formulation to calculate the stress distribution of tires in contact with flat rigid road under the vertical load.
The calculation for the deformed shape and the stress distribution is executed by dividing into many time steps for incremental analysis. And the solutions of each time step are converged by modified Newton-Raphson iteration method.
The results of the finite element analysis of the tire deformation and stress distribution, show good agreement with previous similar analysis of others.