Advanced tire tread simulation through adaptive isogeometric analysis

Tire tread wear is the leading cause of pollution from cars - over 1000x larger than engine exhaust. Tires on electric cars wear out 20% faster on average because of increased torque and weight, so the impact of tire pollution will grow in significance as electric vehicles continue to grow in popularity. Simulation tools used for other aspects of tire and automotive design cannot accurately predict tread wear because intricate tread patterns are too computationally expensive to model with traditional hexahedral and tetrahedral elements used for finite element analysis. In this Phase I SBIR, the company will apply its patent-pending isogeometric analysis ap- proach to predict tire tread wear. In this approach, the time-intensive meshing and defeaturing approximation steps are eliminated. Instead, the computer-aided design model that will be used for manufacturing is used directly in the simulation, immersed in a smooth spline computation domain. The company will partner with a leading rubber fatigue calculation provider to ensure accurate application of its technology to this domain. The ASCR-funded MFEM library will be used to accelerate the compute of locally adaptive regions of the computation domain. In Phase I, the company will enhance MFEM to be able to compute on adapted isogeometric bases, and will integrate this to its isogeometric analysis solver. Industry-specific functionality will be added to the isogeometric analysis solver. A proof of concept workflow will be completed, demonstrating a tire-tread simulation directly on a fully detailed computer-aided design tire model. The proposed workflow is also applicable to the development and simulation of entire non- pneumatic (airless) tires, which feature similar geometric complexity as tire tread. Non-pneumatic tires that don’t go flat may be critical to the broad utilization of autonomous vehicles. Additionally, this technology will be applicable to other industries, including aerospace, defense, automotive, and nuclear energy, that have shown interest in the time-saving, accurate isogeometric analysis approach to finite element analysis.