Experimental Study of the Rolling Contact Forces Between a Tyre Tread Block and a Road

For a rolling tyre, forces arise within the tyre-road contact patch, leading to the excitation of tyre vibrations and in turn to noise radiation. This is the main cause of highway noise and consequently much effort has been made to understand and model the tyre vibrational character as well as the sound radiation. However, when it comes to the generation of contact forces in the tyre-road interface, there is still a demand for future research. Specifically, the understanding and modelling of the influence from tangential force excitation on the resulting tyre-road noise is a complicated topic which involves many parameters such as tread rubber characteristics, road surface character, rolling velocity, rolling resistance and normal load. In this paper, an experimental study of the normal, transverse and longitudinal contact forces which arise for a single tread block in rolling contact with different road surfaces is presented. Using a specially developed test rig, the influence from several of the above mentioned parameters on the resulting contact forces is presented and discussed in the context of tyre-road noise generation.