Calculation method of belt material parameters for finite element tire model

The radial tire belt is composed of multi-layered fiber-reinforced cords with a very complex structure. Restricted by the computing speed, the simplified finite element (FE) tire model with equivalent belt is usually applied in the vehicle dynamic simulation. However, it is always difficult to obtain the material parameters of the equivalent belt. In this paper, a calculation method of equivalent belt material parameters for the simplified FE tire model is proposed based on the three-dimensional (3-D) anisotropic elasticity of the cord reinforced composites. The simulation results of the static radial stiffness, modal characteristics, and dynamic responses for the simplified FE tire model with parameters obtained by the calculation method were compared with experiment results. The results show that the deviation between the experiment and simulation is acceptable, and the validity of the calculation method is verified.