Developing an advance tire hydroplaning model using co-simulation of fully coupled FEM and CFD codes to estimate cornering force

Hydroplaning is a phenomenon which occurs when a layer of water between the tire contact patch and pavement pushes the tire upward. The tire detaches from the pavement, preventing it from providing sufficient forces and moments for the vehicle to respond to driver’s control inputs such as breaking, acceleration and steering. This work is mainly focused on the tire and its interaction with the pavement to address hydroplaning. Fluid Structure Interactions (FSI) between the tire-water-road surfaces are investigated through two approaches. In the first approach, the coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian (CEL) formulation was used. The drawback associated with the CEL method is the laminar assumption and that the behavior of the fluid at length scales smaller than the smallest element size is not captured. As a result, in the second approach, a new Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) model utilizing the shear-stress transport k-ω model and the two-phase flow of water and air, was developed that improves the predictions with real hydroplaning scenarios. Review of the public literature shows that although FEM and CFD computational platforms have been applied together to study tire hydroplaning, developing the tire-surrounding fluid flow CFD model using Star-CCM+ has not been done. This approach, which was developed during this research, is explained in details and the results of hydroplaning speed and cornering force from the FSI simulations are presented and validated using the data from literature.