Innovation in Tire Design: Trends and Technological Advancements

Driving is only getting more complicated. At least, that's true for tire manufacturers, test facilities, test engineers, and product designers. Drivers themselves can rest more easily with every passing year, knowing that you're out there making sure their vehicles get ever safer with each prototype and tire test.

Your goal? To be one of the organizations who help ensure that increase in safety.

Innovation in tire design helps immeasurably in reaching that goal. Understanding what's happening between the rubber and the road in every scenario, from sun to rain to snow to ice, is paramount to designing the safest possible tire. Ditto knowing how tires react to slides, sudden braking, high acceleration, and more. Digging into each of these requires the best in tire footprint analysis.

If you want to take your tires to the cutting edge, you need systems that can measure and analyze them with equal precision. Today, we'll look at the goals and challenges of tire design and how XSENSOR helps alleviate them.

 

Goals of Tire Design

Tire design aims to create a product that sticks to the road regardless of the conditions and meets the increasingly stringent occupant safety requirements that govern vehicles. Weight, material, tread pattern, and other factors contribute to how well a specific tire achieves this goal.

More broadly, you want your design process to advance your product and corporate profile, to ensure your engineers have the tools they need to create the best product, and to attract the most talented resources to your company.

Traditional measurement equipment has long helped designers make the best tires possible for the age. No one could argue that video isn't better than nothing when designing the best cars and components. Yet outdated tools such as video without sensor-based additions lack the insight that today's technology can provide, making it hard to reach your goals.

And that's just one of the many challenges that impact this space.

 

Challenges of Tire Design

Dynamic tire testing brings with it a raft of potential errors and issues. These include:

  • Inconsistent results that engineers find difficult to replicate from one test to the next;
  • Accurate data, but without the level of detail needed to create a complete picture of what's happening beneath the tire's surface;
  • High upfront investment and short obsolescence of equipment;
  • Equipment dedicated to only one kind of test, making it even more expensive to gain a comprehensive understanding;
  • Equipment that is difficult to set up, calibrate, and use on the go; and
  • Technology that only works for some kinds of tires, leaving out other industries.

Most systems today are slow, outdated, inaccurate, and/or unable to capture the whole picture. They may apply only to cars, trucks, or heavy equipment, whereas you need systems that work for farming, industry, passengers, sports cars, and everything else.

 

XSENSOR Technology's Tire Design and Performance Testing Systems

XSENSOR's tire design systems can go anywhere you are. The High-Speed (HS) Tire system is the answer for high-speed testing in a range of locations. For lab work in a range of conditions, you need the X3 Tire Testing system. They both bring their merits to the table for different applications, but they have in common accuracy and excellence with every pass.

High-Speed (HS) Tire System

Understanding tire performance on the go requires a high-speed system that can capture incredibly detailed sensor data in incredibly short amounts of time. XSENSOR's cutting-edge sensor technology captures those fine details, taking multiple readings per pass even at the highest speeds of 150 km/h. Our technology is the best in class, with extremely sensitive pressure capture and analysis and a small error window.

Plus, you never have to deal with the hassle of integrating software and hardware again. Part of the XSENSOR magic is that we develop tools in tandem so you can open the box and get to work.

X3 Tire Testing System

The same goes for capturing data in the lab. Forget about time-sucking (and soul-sucking) struggles to integrate different systems and get them to talk to one another. Instead, you can rely on XSENSOR's wireless hardware to instantly transmit to its powerful software, immediately giving you the results you need.

When you're working in the lab, the X3 Tire Testing System ensures that every measurement is of the highest caliber. It operates in a range of conditions and can even provide readings of sub-soil, so you can feel secure in the knowledge that your tires apply to any scenario.

Best of all, our tire testing systems are meant to stand the test of time. Most tools on the market today require endless recalibration and need to be replaced when you get a handle on them. There is no short obsolescence here: XSENSOR is about the long haul.

 

Industry-Leading Solutions for Manufacturers, Engineers, and Facilities

There's a reason major automotive manufacturers, safety organizations, and testing facilities worldwide rely on XSENSOR's technology. Indeed, our systems are even used in Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) protocols – that's how stable, reliable, accurate, and trusted they are.

This is precisely the kind of expertise we also bring to our tire testing systems. You know how important it is to capture the smallest details when it comes to tread at the highest possible resolution and the shortest time intervals. Only when you know exactly what's happening with each pass and can compare one to the other for reliable results can you truly get a bead on whether or not your tires do the trick.

From race cars to family vehicles, forestry trucks to farming equipment, tires matter – and so does your process. If you want the best for both, it's time to contact XSENSOR and learn about our tire design and performance testing system today.

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