A Novel Measure Method for High-Speed Tire Vibrations

Abstract

With the arrival of faster cars, it was necessary to make a considerable improvement on tire perfor mance. At high speed, tire nonuniformities begin to induce vibrations that are perceived by the passengers and finally degrade vehicle ride quality. Nowadays, it is not possible to guarantee through the usual methods uniformity values (longitudinal, radial and lateral force variations, wheel and tire run out), X-ray inspection, and so on, that a given tire will have a good behavior at high speed. This paper presents a new methodology that makes possible the correlation of high-speed tire vibrations with the measured behavior on an instru mented drum wheel (IDW) at a laboratory. Several tires of different sizes and brand names were measured, and the values were compared with subjective evaluations made on different vehicles. The obtained data were analyzed as a generalization of the model proposed by Walker and Reeves in 1974.