Feasibility Study of Tire Hydroplaning using an Eulerian-Lagrangian
approach in a single Finite Element Code
Adriaan Sillem
Site of the project:
Goodyear
Rue de Luxembourg
Colmar-Berg
Luxemburg
start of the project:
January 2008
In May 2008 the
Interim Thesis has been appeared.
Here
you can find additional material from the master thesis.
The Master project has been finished in November 2008
by the completion of the
Masters
Thesis
and a final presentation
has been given.
The input
for Abacus can be decompressed by the following
decompressor.
For working address etc. we refer to our
alumnipage.
Summary of the master project:
Tire hydroplaning is one major feature for driving safety. As
complete
hydroplaning (aquaplaning) often appears to happen sudden and
unforeseen
when drivers enter a water pond and then tend to react fundamentally
wrong, even the influence of modern electronic stabilizing devices is
limited. Complete control loss and serious accidents are usually the
consequence.
Tire design can make distinct difference in the hydroplaning
performance
resulting in complete contact loss to differ for several deca km/h
driving
velocity. Finally, it can be stated that each and every additional
km/h
with remaining contact counts for the drivers and surrounding peoples
safety. It is in the responsibility of tire manufacturers to care
about
this safety feature within the frame of all required tire performances.
Historically the tire performance has been ranked on experiments
only.
This meant that all design candidates had to be built and tested for
their
individual hydroplaning performance. Obviously, the individual tire
prototype building and individual testing within several optimization
loops has been and still partially is a very time consuming and cost
intensive factor in the tire development cycle.
In addition to that, even very advanced experimental setups for
hydroplaning performance prediction today allow only a very limited
insight in what actually causes the predicted hydroplaning
performance.
Some main influence factors of course are well known, but there are
still
hundreds of small design features influencing the tire hydroplaning
that
can not be clearly separated by the experimental results.
While other tire performance features are already handled with
virtual
prototyping and virtual performance prediction since more than 20
years,
increasing in variety and solution quality, tire hydroplaning
performance
prediction has been approached lately only since being very demanding
for
computational power and tool accuracy. Today, Goodyear has a tool in
place
to predict the tire hydroplaning performance in a loosely coupled,
staggered Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) simulation approach
coupling
the best qualified FEA and CFD codes, that can surely be considered as
one
of the top prediction tools in the tire industry allowing for
additional
virtual prototyping.
However, to stay ahead each promising new capability that is available
on
the market has to be assessed and benchmarked against the current
tools.
Even if the new tool or method will not provide a better solution than
the
existing tools, it definitely provides new, additional experiences
and
ideas that might be used to enhance the current tools at Goodyear.
On the circuit in order to test for tire hydroplaning
Measurements to investigate tire hydroplaning
Contact information:
Kees
Vuik
Back to the
home page
or the
Master students page of Kees Vuik
Nederlands