The development of an enhanced finite element tire model for roadside safety hardware assessment

Abstract

Various types of roadside safety hardware are deployed along highways to safely redirect or contain errant vehicles such that there is no intrusion into a hazardous area or on-coming traffic that may cause harm to the drivers or occupants. Primary factors for the crashworthiness evaluation of these hardwares include structural adequacy, occupant risk, and after-collision vehicle trajectory. Suspension characteristics of the vehicle and tires interaction with safety hardware and surface conditions could influence all these factors. Simulation efforts have resulted in increasingly better replications of crash events, but it has been noted that tire behaviors and failures are still not predicted well. This article will describe efforts to improve the finite element modeling technique of a vehicle tire. A new tire model, having the physical structure of a tire that could influence the nature of operational and crash-induced loading of the tire is presented. Techniques for characterizing the tire material and suspension properties are discussed. Correlation between the simulation results and the full-scale crash testing data is discussed. Measures for assessing occupant injury risk and occupant impact severity are evaluated for both sets of data. Finally, preliminary results using the new tire model in vehicle impact simulations to investigate the effect on vehicle stability, subject to variations in impact conditions such as speed and angle, are presented.