Modeling of truck tire curing process by an experimental and numerical method

Due to the complexity of tire curing process and deficiency of the thermocouple method itself, an effective method which would combine thermocouple method with finite element method to determine the state-of-cure of the truck tire was proposed for the optimization of tire vulcanization. For this purpose, a finite element model was developed based on a new characterizing model for state-of-cure named "departure of torque", and the user subroutine UVARM was used to calculate the curing degree in tire curing process. To accurately simulate the actual temperature in curing process, a composite heat transfer model of belts in tire curing process was developed. Then, the temperature in the internal points of tire was measured to verify the accuracy of the method. The results indicated that there was very good agreement between the model predictions and actual data. The improved method was more accurate and effective than the finite element analysis method, where in the former the temperature deviation basically was not greater than 3 degrees C.