Tire–rim interface pressure of a commercial vehicle wheel under radial loads: theory and experiment

Abstract The simulation of the radial fatigue test of a wheel has been a necessary tool to improve the design of the wheel and calculate its fatigue life. The simulation model, including the strong nonlinearity of the tire structure and material, may produce accurate results, but often leads to a divergence in calculation. Thus, a simplified simulation model in which the complicated tire model is replaced with a tire-wheel contact pressure model is used extensively in the industry. In this paper, a simplified tire–rim interface pressure model of a wheel under a radial load is established, and the pressure of the wheel under different radial loads is tested. The tire–rim contact behavior affected by the radial load is studied and analyzed according to the test result, and the tire–rim interface pressure extracted from the test result is used to evaluate the simplified pressure model and the traditional cosine function model. The results show that the proposed model may provide a more accurate prediction of the wheel radial fatigue life than the traditional cosine function model.