A Modelling Approach to Tire-Obstacle Interaction

In order to improve the behavior of heavy off-road vehicles,the use of numerical simulation has become an absolutely necessarystage. The main difficulty resides in the validity of the tire-groundinteraction model, for a large range of obstacles and test courses, andat all acceptable speeds. In this paper, a new obstacle-tireinteraction model has been presented. Starting from the simple fact thatvertical tire behavior depends essentially on the air contained in thetire, this approach is based on the tire air volume optimisation. Thismodel has been investigated in the case of tire statical deflection, andgood correlation has been obtained with experimental results.