Abstract
The automobile industry is required to deal with the environmental problems including global warming as other industries. Hence, the tire industry is also required to reduce the environmental burden by lowering rolling resistance to improve fuel economy and by improving tire wear to save material. Because rolling resistance and wear are incompatible, the research of tire wear is the important subject. Studies on wear mechanics of tire are classified to three categories, analytical study on indoor and outdoor evaluation, and application of computational mechanics such as the finite element method (FEM). The features of an analytical model are to be used in the conceptual design, to estimate the mechanism and gain an insight more easily than the FEM. Hence, we developed an analytical wear model of tire which can consider the wear caused by higher slip angle or slip ratio. Furthermore, the wear model can deal with the tire wear in arbitrary wear course, since the time history of external force to a tire is calculated by the computer model of the vehicle (CarSim) and then it is transformed to the probability density function of external force by using the shape function of the FEM.
