ABSTRACT
A new computational technique for the thermomechanical analysis of tires in stationary rolling contact is suggested. Different from the existing approaches, the proposed method uses the constitutive description of tire rubber components, such as large deformations, viscous hysteresis, dynamic stiffening, internal heating, and temperature dependency. A thermoviscoelastic constitutive model, which incorporates all the mentioned effects and their numerical aspects, is presented. An isentropic operator-split algorithm, which ensures numerical stability, was chosen for solving the coupled mechanical and energy balance equations. For the stationary rolling-contact analysis, the constitutive model presented and the operator-split algorithm are embedded into the Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE)–relative kinematic framework. The flow of material particles and their inelastic history within the spatially fixed mesh is described by using the recently developed numerical technique based on the Time Discontinuous Galerkin (TDG) method. For the efficient numerical solutions, a three-phase, staggered scheme is introduced. First, the nonlinear, mechanical subproblem is solved using inelastic constitutive equations. Next, deformations are transferred to the subsequent thermal phase for the solution of the heat equations concerning the internal dissipation as a source term. In the third step, the history of each material particle, i.e., each internal variable, is transported through the fixed mesh corresponding to the convective velocities. Finally, some numerical tests with an inelastic rubber wheel and a car tire model are presented.
