Tyre wear model: A fusion of rubber viscoelasticity, road roughness, and thermodynamic state

Wear is due to many causes and involves three major consequences: loss of performance, loss of security and environmental pollution. Depending on the context, the focus on the consequence can be moved: in motorsport tyre's fundamental role is to guarantee high performance as long as it is possible, in road vehicles safety has decisive importance compared to the safety target, in big densely-populated cities the pollution due to tyre particles can be of considerable importance. The main objective of this work is to describe a necessary set of instruments concerning tyre wear mechanism-related phenomena, allowing to better understand and to develop an improved formulation, able to consider the tread compound viscoelastic characteristics, the pavement roughness and the tyre operating conditions. To this purpose the modelling approach considers the viscoelastic behaviour of the compound, changing instant by instant its nominal characteristics as a function of the excitation frequency and the material temperature. To validate the modelling approach proposed and its reliability in completely different scenarios of use, the authors have selected five datasets collected on vehicles belonging to diverse motorsport, passenger and truck categories, unique in terms of vehicle operating conditions both from kinematic-dynamic and thermodynamic points of view.