Tire Noise Prediction through 2D Tread Pattern Design

Abstract

Noise emitted by rolling tires has a strong contribution on the traffic noise in urban areas and has a significant impact on the ride comfort for passengers, which is mainly caused by the interaction between tires and pavement. The force generated in the contact patch has an important contribution to tire noise. For a patterned tire rolling on a flat surface, the geometry and position of tread pattern blocks are one of the main influencing factors of discontinuous force. In this paper, it is assumed that the impact force produced by each tread pattern element and pavement can be expressed as a Dirac delta function. For more realistic modelling of noise generated by impact force, a weighting function is considered, which is distributed along the tread transverse direction. The experiment is performed on a drum experimental machine in a semi-anechoic room. The predicted results are compared with experimental measurement, the maximum error is 3.85 dB between the predicted sound pressure level and measured. The prediction results have sufficient accuracy on the trend of A-weighted sound pressure level. The prediction method in this paper can be used to accelerate the development process of low tire tread pattern in the future.