Dynamics of vehicle-pavement coupled system based on a revised flexible roller contact tire model

A revised flexible roller contact tire model (RFRC tire model) is proposed, which considers not only the geometric and flexible filtering effect, but also tire damping and pavement displacement. A vehicle-pavement coupled system is modeled as a two DOF oscillator moving along a simply supported beam on a linear viscoelastic foundation. By using the Galerkin’s and Direct Integral method, dynamical responses of the vehicle-pavement coupled system are obtained based on the RFRC tire model and the traditional single point contact tire model (SPC tire model). The simulation results are compared with test data and the validity of the proposed RFRC tire model is verified. Differences between the two models are also investigated. It is found that the dynamical behaviors for both models agree with each other quite well when road surface roughness is a long harmonic wave. On the other hand, they are different under short harmonic wave or impulse road excitation. Thus the RFRC tire model should be used to compute the tire force and investigate dynamical responses of vehicle and pavement. Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 10672107, 50625518), and the Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province (Grant No. E2007000657)