The creation of the tyre’s digital twin is divided into two phases: the first addresses the tyre geometry, comprehending layers’ thicknesses, meridian profile and user-defined discretization level; the second regards the structural behaviour of the tyre, parametrizing the contact patch variations with varying boundary conditions, starting from images acquired through static or dynamic tests (usually Tekscan or pressure-sensitive paper sheets are adopted).

The output of the tool consists in the parameterization files used within the thermoRIDE model, weaRIDE model and adheRIDE model.

The output of the tool consists in several extra “virtual telemetry” physical channels, including the tires’ dynamics and kinematics, in terms of forces, wheel orientation and slip estimations at each corner. Giving the possibility to estimate the tires’ behavior in each vehicle operating condition, TRICK enriches the standard telemetry datasets with the information concerning the tire interaction characteristics and, therefore, increases the amount of information that track sessions can provide.

Furthermore, TRICK dynamic and kinematic channels per corner enable the employment of the tire physical models, allowing to add further physical features within the enriched dataset, as thermal, wear or transient phenomena. Starting from the outdoor data, so constituted dataset can be exploited to evaluate the dynamic tire characteristics or to properly identify the tire parameters from a multi-physical point of view, with the aim to calibrate the tire models in the widest possible vehicle working conditions range and to reproduce its extremely non-linear behavior within the simulation environment.

The definition of a procedure able to estimate tire forces and slip indices during test sessions can represent a crucial task for many in automotive industry, such as vehicle manufacturers, vehicle dynamics engineers and tire production companies. TRICK has been exploited as both a development tool to be employed in the earliest prototyping phases and as a data analysis advanced tool for experimental activities carried out with high performance vehicles during the setup preparation sessions, since it significantly increases the amount of crucial data available to understand how the vehicle and its tires are performing, taking strategic decisions for vehicle and tires setup development.

The innovation represented by the TRICK is in its novel approach in tire characterization and in tire models correlation with outdoor vehicle data, since it enables the understanding of the dynamic response of the whole vehicle and of the tires by means of simple and smart outdoor track sessions, carried out employing the vehicle as a moving lab, with no need of bulky and expensive tire test benches.

Silver medal at Vehicle Dynamics awards 2014

Starting from the raw data, RIDElab enables smart procedures for the elimination of the outliers, reliable evaluation of camber and load effects, leading the user to a robust identification of both the Pacejka’s Magic Formula based and other mechanical tire interaction models, taking also into account of their variations towards complex multi-physical of tire/road contact phenomena. The effects induced by thermal and wear phenomena on frictional and structural tire behavior, including the discrimination between the effects due to tread layers and carcass temperature, to compound degradation, road roughness influence and polymers viscoelastic characteristics, can be smartly identified and validated with the RIDElab tool.

RIDElab is moreover adopted by our partners, to: