Tire dimensionless numbers for analysis of tire characteristics and intelligent tire signals

Tires are the only elements in the vehicle that are in contact with the road surface. The forces and moments between the tire and the road surface play a major role in the acceleration, deceleration, and steering of the vehicle. Estimation of tire states such as tire load, pressure, and wear is an important study in vehicle control/vehicle state estimation [1] and autonomous vehicles [2,3]. Also, analyzing tire characteristics such as tire sidewall stiffness [4], contact property [5], and rolling resistance [6] is an important study in the measurement field. Intelligent tires are new concept tires with additional sensors inside the tires. Intelligent tires have the advantage of being It is essential to understand and analyze the characteristics of the tire. This paper focuses on analyzing tire characteristics using intelligent tires based on physical tire models. The flexible ring tire model has been selected as the tire model. The flexible ring tire model is analyzed and simplified based on modal analysis. Four tire dimensionless numbers have been proposed to represent tire characteristics using the Buckingham theorem. Tire dimen-sionless numbers were estimated using intelligent tire sensor signals. The estimation algo-rithm was designed based on the standing wave characteristics of the tire. The proposed estimation algorithm has been validated through experiments on various tire conditions. The physical correlation between the estimated tire dimensionless numbers and the tire state dimensionless numbers were analyzed. The experimental results verify the physical meaning and estimation performance of the proposed tire dimensionless numbers. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.