The influence of lateral road surface resolution on the simulation of car tyre rolling losses and rolling noise

Paper in proceeding, 2013

CO2 emissions and traffic noise are two major environmental issues associated with road traffic. Increased efforts are made to develop suitable simulation tools for the prediction of tyre rolling losses and rolling noise. The accurate description of the tyre/road interaction under rolling conditions is crucial for these simulations. Besides an accurate contact model, input data of sufficiently high quality is required. Ac- cordingly, the measurement effort for the road roughness profiles is high: in the rolling direction distances of several meters need to be scanned at positions less than a millimetre apart. While in the lateral direction a lower resolution can be accepted, still between ten and twenty parallel profile tracks are required under perfect conditions. Yet, in reality road surface scans are typically restricted to very few lateral tracks due to limited resources. This study evaluates how rolling resistance and rolling noise simulations are affected if the number of independent lateral road scans is less than the number of lateral tracks in the contact model. Different schemes for extrapolating the missing lateral information from the available data are tested for several tyre/road combinations. It is shown that a certain number of parallel road surface scans is necessary for accurate prediction of rolling noise and rolling resistance.