Abstract
This presentation gives a brief review of past and present challenges in the multibody modeling and the dynamic analysis of wheeled vehicles. The emphasis of the presentation is on the weakest link of a vehicle model--the tires. The evolution of tire models, like any other component in a multibody model, has experienced major advances during the past three decades. Early tire models were comprised of simple analytical expressions or they were purely empirically based curve fitting procedures. Recent models are more complex and have moved towards representing the structure of a tire in more detail. In this presentation we investigate the possibility of employing existing high-resolution finite-element tire models in multibody dynamics.
