Constitutive Modelling of a tire Plunger Test through Finite Element simulation
William Manjud Maluf Filho1; Debora Francisco Lalo2; Marcelo Greco2
1 Centro de Engenharia Automotiva da Escola Politecnica da Universidade de São Paulo; 2 Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
doi:10.20906/CPS/CILAMCE2017-0790
Resumo
Almost all road vehicles have wheels with pneumatic tires. Tire development made possible to the automotive industry to design comfortable and safe road vehicles. According to the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) some test procedures for tire endurance, high-speed performance and strength are required. Tire strength, for example, is verified by a Plunger Test. This test procedure aims to press the tire by a cylindrical steel plunger with a hemispherical end perpendicularly into a raised tread element as near as possible to the centerline of the tread, at a rate of 50 mm/min, until the tire breaks or the plunger is stopped by the rim. Thus, the Plunger test is performed to determine the belts breaking energy value for the tire. These values are taken into account to estimate the tire reliability. Due to the physical nonlinearity and uncertainty inherent in tire system a three-dimensional finite element model (FEM) was proposed. The elastomers were modeled by using the Mooney-Rivilin model and the composites by the equivalent orthotropic material model based on the Halpin-Tsai equations in the commercial software Abaqus®. The hyperelastic material constants were obtained from experimental data and are confidential for the tire industry. Comparisons between numerical and experimental Plunger test results demonstrated the accuracy of the proposed model where numerical results presented errors less than 10%.
Palavras-chave: Plunger Test; Hyperelastic constitutive models; Plunger test, Hyperelastic constitutive model, Finite element analysis