Basic Mechanisms and Predictive Testing of Tire-Road Abrasion

Abstract

The chapter provides a brief overview of the abrasion mechanisms occurring on automotive tires. Particular attention is paid to fatigue abrasion, which is especially the cause of mass loss in passenger car tires in public road traffic. The framework of the paper is a very simple physical model (Resnikowskij, Kautschuk Gummi Kunststoffe 9:33–37, 1960) of the relationship between abrasion and friction work during Hertzian contact and sliding friction of rubber over the periodical roughness of a road. Essential physical quantities of the rubbers determined in the laboratory, such as modulus, tensile elongation, coefficient of friction, and a Woehler-like fatigue parameter, give an expression for laboratory fatigue wear that correlates very well with tire wear under an outdoor test program commonly used by tire companies on public highways. This result also makes it clear why tire wear under moderate severity conditions cannot be described by abrasive wear tests in the laboratory, e.g. with DIN-Abrader.