Investigation of pneumatic tire-roadway interaction

The nonlinear analysis of fib er-reinforced multilayer composite structuresis one of the most formidable problems in solid and structural mechanics. Thisproblem clearly appears in the stress and deformation analysis of pneumatic tires.A typical tire construction either conventional or radial is a very complexstructure. such structure exhibites both anisotropy and heterogeneity with itsconstituents. In addition to such complex structure, tire response exhibitesgeometrical and material nonlinearities. With the impossibility to analyze thiscomplex problem analytically and the difficulties encountered with theexperimental work, an accurate computational model is needed to handle suchdilemma.A general and efficient computational model capable of analyzing the non-linear response of fiber-reinforced multilayer composite structures is presented,with a especial attention to the stress and deformation analysis of pneumatic tiresin elasto-static contact with rigid surfaces. The geometrical nonlinearity due tolarge elastic deformations as well as the material nonlinearity due to stiffness-deformation dependency are accounted for. The finite element method, as anefficient numerical tool, is used to construct the discretized three-dimensionalmodel of the problem. The proposed nonlinear three-dimensional finite elementmodel is based on the principle of virtual work or the corresponding minimumpotential energy principle, in the general framework of the theory of nonlinearelasticity. Lagrangian description is adopted to model the nonlinear behavior of theconsidered structure. Also, the composite material theories either in microscopic ormacroscopic scale are used to model the fiber-reinforced copmposites. Further, toformulate the contact problem of the tire-roadway, the mathematical programmingapproach, which has been proved to be superior, is adopted to present an efficientmodel available for both frictionless and frictional contacts. With frictional