4/18/22, 1:18 PM Tire Friction Studies Reveal How The Rubber Meets The Road

MATERIALS

Tire Friction Studies Reveal How The

Rubber Meets The Road
New advances in tribology are improving the models engineers use to design new tires
by
Mitch Jacoby
June 1, 2015
| A version of this story appeared in
Volume 93, Issue 22

L ike other experienced drivers, when Bo

N. J. Persson steps on the gas, applies the
brakes, or heads into a turn, he automatically
checks road and traffic conditions to make sure he’s
driving safely. But unlike most motorists, Persson also
BO KNOWS TIRES MOST POPULAR IN
MATERIALS
It’s time to get serious about
recycling lithium-ion batteries

thinks about rubber viscoelasticity, shear forces, and Why glass recycling in the US is
broken
road surface topography.
Reliance buys sodium-ion battery
For 20 years, Persson, a staff researcher at the Jülich start-up Faradion
Research Center in Germany, has been trying to Why Sodium And Potassium
understand the fundamental processes that cause Really Explode In Water
friction—especially between automobile tires and road
The Nazi origins of deadly nerve
surfaces. He’s developed a mathematical theory that gases
encompasses numerous aspects of this everyday
Names for elements 113, 115,
phenomenon, which is critical to ensuring that 117, and 118 finalized by IUPAC
automobiles hug the road securely. Several pieces of the Credit: Jülich Research Center

friction puzzle remain missing. But one of them, which Bo Persson of the Jülich Research Center in
Germany develops computational and
describes the conditions under which polymer chains on experimental techniques to understand friction
tire surfaces briefly stick to roads, has just been between tires and road surfaces.
uncovered. The finding helps provide a more complete
picture of rubber-road tribology, a topic that includes
friction, wear, and lubrication.

“Tribology tends to be a neglected subject,” Persson says. One reason it typically isn’t covered in
university courses, he says, is the absence of a rigorous theory describing the underlying
phenomena. Yet the details of rubber friction, though complex in nature, have major practical
applications for manufacturing tires and other products. “If you understand the details at the most
basic level, then you can start making logical tire design changes,” he asserts.

A successful tire design needs to meet a few main performance criteria, including low rolling
resistance, low wear rates, long lifetimes, and high friction during braking. Accommodating some of
those criteria, such as low rolling resistance and high braking friction, “is tricky because they seem
opposed to one another,” Persson says. If researchers understood the origins of those parameters
in detail, much of the design work could be done through computer modeling. Instead, he says,
engineers mainly analyze tire design through trial and error, which is slow and costly.

One important rubber property is viscoelasticity, the tendency of the material to deform under a
pressure—like the one caused by a car’s weight pressing a tire against small road bumps. Those
interactions cause rubber molecules inside a tire to move and vibrate. The extent of that energetic
molecular commotion, which depends on the nature of the rubber and roughness of the road,
strongly influences a tire’s rolling resistance and overall friction properties.

But a new study conducted by Persson and coworkers, including Seungkuk Nam, a rubber friction
specialist and mechanical engineer at Hankook Tire, in Daejeon, South Korea, shows that shearing
between the tire surface and the road also contributes significantly to tire friction under some
conditions. This shearing is the result of small-scale dragging of polymer molecules as the tire rolls
down the road.

https://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i22/Tire-Friction-Studies-Reveal-Rubber.html 1/3
 4/18/22, 1:18 PM Tire Friction Studies Reveal How The Rubber Meets The Road

In the study, the team analyzed friction properties of three tire tread compounds—those used in
summer, winter, and all-season formulations—on two asphalt road surfaces and on a sandpaper
surface. They used a stylus instrument and an atomic force microscope to measure the
topographies of the tire and road surfaces on multiple length scales. They conducted friction
measurements as they dragged the materials on the surfaces at a variety of temperatures but at low
speeds to avoid frictional heating.

The team found that dragging forces between the tire and road caused a type of sticking friction
arising from polymer chains adhering to the road surface, stretching, breaking free, and reattaching
repeatedly (J. Chem. Phys. 2015, DOI: 10.1063/1.4919221).

Persson emphasizes that the new results apply only to low sliding speeds and dry surfaces. He
explains that on wet surfaces, a nanometer-thick film of water between the rubber and the road
inhibits shearing processes, leaving mainly the viscoelastic contribution to friction.

In addition to uncovering a new component of tire friction, the study again confirms the accuracy of
Persson’s mathematical theory: Velocity- and temperature-dependent data calculated using the
theory closely match the measured data. Persson’s theoretical formulation, now available as
software modules from Multiscale Consulting, is used by several tire industry scientists, who rave
about it.

For example, Toshio Tada, a research manager at Sumitomo Rubber Industries, in Kobe, Japan,
uses the software to help design tires that perform well on wet roads. “Until recently, there was no
reliable predictor for wet grip performance,” he says. “Time-consuming and expensive trial-and-error
testing using prototype tires was inevitable.”

Now, Tada’s group can predict friction coefficients for various types of road surfaces and conditions
and knows which tire material and mechanical properties are most important for friction. The
advance has enabled Sumitomo to reduce the duration of R&D programs, he says.

Hankook’s Nam is similarly enthusiastic. His team puzzled over results of tests designed to evaluate
variations in road surface roughness and braking performance. He acknowledges that “for a long
time, we struggled to figure out which properties of road surfaces are important for rubber friction.”
Since using the new software, the Hankook group has gotten a good grip on those friction
parameters. “We now quantitatively understand the role of surface roughness on multiple length
scales,” he notes.

Some unknowns still remain, however. For example, Nam says, it’s still difficult to use theory to
predict what happens when dust, rubber particles, and other microscopic debris work their way
between the tire and the road. It’s also challenging to understand how viscoelasticity is affected by
interactions between polymer chains and the carbon and silica particles commonly used in tire
manufacturing.

Answering those questions and others, in part, will help further the understanding of tire friction. And
with that, scientists may soon finally know what happens when the rubber meets the road.  

Chemical & Engineering News

ISSN 0009-2347
Copyright © 2022 American Chemical Society

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