Experimental Measurement of In-Plane Rolling Nonpneumatic Tire Vibrations Using High-Speed Imaging

This article presents a novel experimental technique for measuring in-plane deformations and vibration modes of a rotating nonpneumatic tire subjected to obstacle impacts. The tire was mounted on a modified quarter-car test rig, which was built around one of the drums of a 500-horse power chassis dynamometer at Clemson University's International Center for Automotive Research. A series of experiments were conducted using a high-speed camera to capture the event of the rotating tire coming into contact with a cleat attached to the surface of the drum. The resulting video was processed using a two-dimensional digital image correlation algorithm to obtain in-plane radial and tangential deformation fields of the tire. The dynamic mode decomposition algorithm was implemented on the deformation fields to extract the dominant frequencies that were excited in the tire upon contact with the cleat. It was observed that the deformations and the modal frequencies estimated using this method were within a reasonable range of expected values. In general, the results indicate that the method used in this study can be a useful tool in measuring in-plane deformations of rolling tires without the need for additional sensors and wiring.