Effect of Friction on rolling tire - Pavement Interaction

Accurate modeling of tire‐pavement contact behavior (i.e., distribution of contact tractions at the interface) plays an important role in the analysis of pavement performance and vehicle driving safety. The tire‐pavement contact is essentially a rolling contact problem. Many aspects, such as the transient contact with nonlinear frictional properties at the tire‐pavement interface, make the rolling contact problem more difficult than it may appear at first glance. The nonlinear frictional contact could introduce numerical difficulties into the finite element method (FEM) solution because the contact area and distribution of the contact tractions are not known beforehand. Therefore, it is appealing to formulate and implement high‐fidelity FE models capable of accurately simulating the tire‐pavement contact behavior. However, obtaining an accurate frictional relationship is difficult for tire‐pavement interaction. The friction between the tire and pavement is a complex phenomenon depending on many factors, such as viscoelastic properties of rubber, pavement texture, temperature, vehicle speed, slip ratio, and normal pressure. Field measurements have clearly shown that the friction between the tire and pavement is dependent of vehicle speed and the slip ratio at the vehicle maneuvering processes.