Correlation Between Blade Abrasion and Real Road Wear Testing

In the last fifty years, the mechanisms of rubber abrasion have been studied by a large number of different researchers.  Even though the exact mechanism is still not clear, there is a general agreement that the fundamental process is one of fatigue crack growth. Previous studies that have attempted to relate crack growth behaviour in fatigue to the actual rate of abrasion of an individual asperity on a rubber surface during blade abrasion have been seen to produce a reasonable correlation for some simple rubber materials such as unfilled SBR compounds. In this study, blade abrasion is used to evaluate three different tyre tread compounds in order to correlate the lab based behaviour with real road test wear data.