Tire Lateral Force Modeling and the Bushing Analogy Tire Model
Abstract The Bushing Analogy Tire (BAT) model has been studied for tire dynamics modeling in vertical and lateral directions. It was shown that the vibration characteristics included in the BAT model in the vertical and lateral directions cover the tire modes in those directions up to about 100 Hz. This capability of the BAT model is suitable for vehicle ride simulations. However, in vehicle handling situations such as accident avoidance, the tire is subjected to sudden steering motions that are not included in the vertical and lateral dynamics. The steering generates tire slip angle and, hence, the lateral forces for vehicle direction change. The tire steering motion also generates the aligning torque, which modifies the slip angle of the tire with respect to the wheel input steering angle. The tire steering compliance is therefore important for the dynamic responses during the vehicle handling maneuvers. In this paper, tire compliance in the steering direction is studied by treating the steering motion as an independent motion of the 3-dimentional tires. In this paper, the steering stiffness (or compliance) of a tire is first derived from the analysis results of a tire Finite Element (FE) model. Comparing the steering direction vibration modes using the BAT model with the FE model extracted modes further validates the steering stiffness. The coupling of tire steering stiffness with the vertical forces is also studied. Then, the effects of the tire steering direction stiffness are used to study a data set of flat-track generated tire lateral force and moment. The procedure of generating required coefficients of a handling tire model coupled with tire dynamic features of the BAT model were also investigated.