31st Annual Meeting and Conference on Tire Science and Technology

The International Exposition (I-X) Center: Cleveland, OH, USA

Tuesday, September 18, 2012: 3:30 PM
Grand Ballroom (The International Exposition (I-X) Center)
Han Seok Park1, Seong Rae Kim1, Ki Deug Sung1, Yong Gu Kang2 and Chang Sung Seok3, (1)Design Analysis Research Team R&D Center, NEXEN Tire Company, Yangsan-Si, Kyungnam, South Korea, (2)Compound Development R&D Center, NEXEN Tire Company, Yangsan-Si, Kyungnam, South Korea, (3)School of Mechanical Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon-Si, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea
The durability of the tire is a very important performance and a matter that should be considered a top priority during tire development in terms of passenger safety and vehicle protection. Also, social necessity for the eco-friendly cars is rapidly growing because of high oil prices and environmental regulations, so the early commercialization of electric vehicles is becoming possible. For this reason, the development of high durability tire has been required in the tire industry that can endure the high weight of the electric car. To ensure tire durability, it is necessary to evaluate and analyze at bead area fracture life and position. Estimation of the cracking problem has been studied by various methods. Of them, FEM(Finite Element Method) requires re-mesh process and computing time. However XFEM (eXtended Finite Element Method) developed by Belytschko does not require re-mesh process according to the crack propagation, so it is easy to apply to the crack propagation method. Because of these advantages, XFEM has been used to deal with crack problems in many recent papers. Therefore, in this paper, we apply XFEM to tire fracture problem to visualize fracture location in the bead area and aspects of fracture are compared with standard endurance test result.