Dynamic Tire Testing - Real-Time Tire Wear Analysis: How Sensors Improve Tire Design

When navigating busy traffic, your average driver doesn't think much about tire design innovations. It's unlikely they're meditating on the value of a good dynamic tire footprint analysis while waiting to pick up their kid from soccer practice. Until they skid out or fishtail, they don't give tires much thought.

Anyone who designs, prototypes, or tests tires for a living, though? You spend a lot of time thinking about it, so no one needs to tell you how important it is to back up your decisions with data.

When it comes to tire designs, wear is one of the most important areas in which to gather data. Any tire can look good rolling off the manufacturing line; it's all about how it holds up over time. Tires that break down quickly and can't handle a lot of turning or acceleration aren't as safe for the driver. Even if your tires aren't built for Speed Racer, you still need to know how they wear and how long they stay safe.

Again, this is a matter of needing good data. That's where sensors come in.

Tire Wear Data: Worth the Effort for Better Results

A significant relationship exists between tires and the vehicle to which they are attached. Good tires protect the vehicle; a properly functioning vehicle protects its tires. If tires are wearing down faster than they should be, that tells you something is wrong with the car, whether it's alignment, shocks, tire pressure, or anything else. These, however, are concerns for a mechanic.

It is the tire designer and tester's job to understand how tires are supposed to function so that they can make claims about how they're supposed to wear, what kind of punishment they can handle, and how long they're safe to use (with or without rotation). Similar claims need to be made about how much precipitation – rain, snow, or ice – a tire can handle while still sticking to the road.

Only data can help you here. Specifically, dynamic tire pressure testing can help you understand what's happening with tires when rubber hits the road. At what point do they begin to break down? What kind of pressure can they withstand before adverse results occur? When does the risk of blowouts increase? And so on.

When answering such questions, dynamic tire testing is where it's at.

Dynamic Tire Testing: The What & the Why

The main purpose of dynamic tire testing—capturing what's happening on the underside, or contact patch, of a tire while it's in motion against the road surface—is to understand how tires perform at high speeds and what can cause them to fail.

Your dynamic tire testing system must have a few essential characteristics to capture the best possible pressure data.

High Frame Rate

Foremost among these is a high frame rate. If your data is captured too slowly, you won't be able to tell what's happening in the gaps between measurements. Since much of the information often lies in those gaps, you need to get them as small as possible.

Otherwise, the tire has already moved on by the time you capture the data. This leaves you in the dark, without the information you need to draw conclusions about tire wear in real time.

Sensitive Sensor Response

Another basic characteristic is a supersensitive sensor response. Without suitable sensors, capturing what truly happens between the rolling tire and the ground is impossible. Either way, you risk losing information about critical peak pressure and load data: low frame rate or sensitivity.

High Spatial Resolution

Finally, you need high spatial resolution. This means sensors are densely arrayed to capture all possible details of the tire, including grooves, tie bars, notches, and sipes. If you miss any of these while capturing the tire's footprint, you will have a harder time building a representative gestalt of the entire product.

Note that while the above traits may be "basic," any good system must still be finely tuned without needing much calibration or setup. That leads us to some of the main challenges in tire testing.

Challenges in Tire Testing

Historically, tire testing has proven challenging because of the limitations imposed by the laboratory setting. These challenges include:

• A lack of portability, as tire testing systems were often confined to a single place.
• Onerous setup and integration requirements before the system was usable.
• Limitations on the speed of the vehicle to capture high-quality, accurate data.

These limitations no longer exist. XSENSOR's systems allow you to test tires anywhere, from the lab to the racetrack, with an easily assembled system whose results remain accurate in any setting. You can break down and reassemble the system in little time somewhere else on the track or in another setting. That means it's easy to capture several test scenarios in one day.

With data available in seconds, you won't have to wonder what happened either. Instead, you'll instantly know the results of a changing variable and what that means for prototyping and safety. This allows you to adjust on the go and see immediate feedback.

Deeper Data: Work With XSENSOR Today

If you're ready to capture deeper, better-performance data on your tires, it's time to work with XSENSOR. Our fully integrated software and hardware package combines refined sensor technology with analytics software, leaving you much more informed than you currently are.

It's time to take tire design performance testing to the next level. Our products are used in companies and regulatory bodies around the world because they work. Contact us to find out how they can work for you.