Dynamics of Tire Crossing on a Gapped Road Surface

The safety of cars and trucks crossing gapped road surfaces can be affected by their operational speed, mass, and the tire and road surface characteristics. As part of a research on the safety of road vehicles crossing discontinuous road surfaces, the dynamic behavior of a single tire passing a gap has been examined as reported in this paper. First, the kinematics of a tire crossing the gap in the road surface is analytically formulated. The formulation has shown that the tire exhibits three distinct (single-point, two-point, and flying) modes of travel depending on its operational speed. The dynamics of the tire are larger in single-point mode that exhibits two critical velocities, which have been validated using a nonlinear arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian method in the finite-element framework. The validated analytical model has shown that the critical velocity is mainly affected by the mass of the overburden.