Issue 43

P. Zampieri et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 43 (2018) 191-204; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.43.15 199 Figure 14 : Modelling of the tyre. Figure 15 : Wheel/rigid wall subsystem. In order to simulate properly the tyre behaviour, the material properties of the rubber have been modelled in order to replicate the experimental response of a tyre similar to the investigated one. In particular, such response consists of measuring the tyre deflection under an increasing vertical force. In order to do this, a FE analysis involving only the wheel-rigid wall system has been considered (Fig. 15). Fig. 16 shows the numerical-experimental correlation of the vertical force vs. the measured tyre deflection curves. Figure 16 : Numerical and experimental vertical forces vs. tyre deflection. According to Fig. 16, it can be noticed that the numerical model overestimates the experimental response. This can be attributed to the fact that the experimental response, found in literature, is referred to a tyre (H34 x 10R16) which is slightly smaller than the investigated one (H30 x 8.8 R15). However, the tyre modelling can be considered efficient. The difference, in terms of percentage, has been calculated to be around 10%.