Abstract
The basic purpose of a tire is to enable better vehicle performances such as driving performance, rolling resistance, durability, ride comfort, noise, wear resistance, etc, by providing a flexible cushion. In response to improvement of vehicle performances, the design method of a tire is developing much. This study proposes a structural design method for a tire contour by considering both the tread contour and the sidewall contour, simultaneously. However, the existing studies of tire contour optimization were interested in the tread contour and the sidewall, respectively. The durability, maneuverability and ride comfort are the commonly investigated performances in tire contour design. The durability, maneuverability and ride comfort can be measured by the value of strain energy density, tension and vertical stiffness, respectively. The optimization technique using metamodel is introduced to maximize durability satisfying the imposed constraints of tension and ride comfort. To achieve this, the responses defined in optimization formulation are expressed in mathematically explicit form with respect to the design variables by using kriging surrogate model, resulting a simple optimization problem. Then, the simulated annealing algorithm is utilized to find global optimum.
Keywords: Tire, Contour design, Kriging, Optimization, Simulated annealing