Nano-Architecture Design for Tire Materials

Tire technology can be described as the integration of technological elements, which correspond to scale range from nano to macro scales. The number of combinations will be millions of ways and a great number of trials and errors in tire development have contributed to the progress in tire technology. On the other hands the market demands dramatically changes as a result of increasing issues on an environmental concern and a resource problem. To manage the tire developments among this, the important point is how fast we can find the best one for customers from millions of possibilities. Computational science is one of the solutions to find the best one from millions of ways. The tire industry has been applying finite element analysis to tire development since the late 1960’s. This is due to the complexity of tire construction and the difficulty of understanding the mechanical behaviour inside a tire. The technique has been recently extended as a tool for nano-architecture design for tire materials development. The purpose is to achieve the fast tailor-made design of materials for customer demands. The virtual simulation of nano-architecture gives us ideas which have not been realized in the state of art for compound design. It is expected that we will soon design nano-architecture to meet the target performance of tires.