The tire technology from the standpoint of yesterday, today and tomorrow will be reviewed.  

Yesterday; a finite element method was developed in 1950s as a tool of computational mechanics.  In Bridgestone Corporation, FEA was started applying to a tire analysis in the beginning of 1970s and this was much earlier than the vehicle industry, electric industry, and others.  The main reason was that construction and configurations of a tire were so complicated that analytical approach could not solve many problems related with a tire mechanics.  Since the commercial software was not so popular in 1970s, the in-house codes were developed for three kinds of application such as stress/strain, heat conduction and modal analysis.  In 1980s computer speed became reasonable and the commercial software was improved.  But in-house axisymmetric code was still mainly used for tire analysis because the computer speed was not still sufficient for a tire analysis.  Since FEA could make the stress/strain visible in a tire, the application area was mainly tire durability.

Today; combining FEA with optimization technique, the tire design procedure is drastically changed in tire side wall shape, tire crown shape, pitch variation, tire pattern, and etc.  So the computational mechanics becomes an indispensable tool for tire industry.  Furthermore, the insight to improve tire performance is obtained from the optimized solution and the new technologies are created from the insight.  Then, FEA is applied to a various area such as hydroplaning and snow traction based on the formulation of fluid-tire interaction.  Since the computational mechanics enables us to see what we could not see, the new tire patterns are developed by seeing fluid flow in tire contact area and shear stress in snow in traction.

Tomorrow; the computational mechanics will be applied in multi-disciplinary area and nano-scale area to create a new technology.