Tire-pavement Coupling Dynamic Simulation under Tire High-speed-rolling Condition

The coupling effect between tire and pavement is an intensively researched subject to analyse the dynamic interaction of the vehicle-pavement system. By considering the 11.00 R20 tire and expressway asphalt pavement, ABAQUS software was employed in this study to establish an improved model for simulating the coupling effect, in which the tire rubber was taken as a neoHookean material and the pavement was taken as a multilayer structure. The coupling was achieved by considering the equilibrium equation and continuity conditions of the contact surface. The tire rolling, which was modelled by the “steady-state transport” method provided by ABAQUS software, was imported to the tire-pavement coupling for the explicit dynamic computation. Numerical results indicate that the pavement deformation obviously weakens the tire vibration in comparison with the non-deformable assumption, in which the variance of the vertical acceleration at the tire centre is reduced by 25 % and the power spectral density is decreased by 52 %. The influence of the horizontal contact stress (CSHEAR) is considered by taking different friction coefficients. Compared with the case without the CSHEAR, the stresses in the longitudinal and lateral directions within the contact area on the pavement surface are increased by approximately 45 %. This study simulates a more realistic situation, including the contact stress and high-speed-rolling tire, thus the conclusions provide a reference for the optimization and design of vehicles and pavement structures. (Received in June 2015, accepted in December 2015. This paper was with the authors 2 months for 2 revisions.)