Simplified Prediction of Ply Steer in Radial Tires

Abstract

Abstract Ply steer is a rolling contact phenomenon which manifests itself as a lateral force acting at the ground plane of a tire constrained in yaw or a change in slip angle of a tire free to yaw. It has long been known that radial tires generally exhibit greater ply steer than do bias tires. However, the only previously published quantitative analysis of this phenomenon considered the multi-layer cord-rubber composite by means of netting analysis, which is not very accurate at cord angles typical of radial tire belts. A simple, explicit expression is developed herein by combining modern composite laminate theory with two very simple, uniform-stress-state tire-road contact models. The ply-steer results predicted by the resulting expressions are compared with some experimental results and the agreement is found to be reasonably satisfactory.