Development of Automatic CAD Drawing for Tyre

Mould Design
Nanang Ali Sutisna
Mechanical Engineering Department
President University
Jababeka, Cikarang, Indonesia
nanang.ali@president.ac.id

Abstract— This paper presents the development of

occur in the rubber compounds and then the compounds are
automatic drawing algorithm to generate CAD drawing transformed into strong, elastic materials in the finished
automatically based on the tyre parameter being designed. tyre. Fig. 1 shows the tyre mold construction.
The purpose of the study is to find a way to greatly reduce the
time needed for generating a CAD drawing of a tyre mould.
The program was developed to be able to run in CATIA V5
CAD software and uses database of tyre parameters gathered
both from international standards and mould design best
practices. The result shows that the system did the job well
and took less than two hours to complete a tyre mould
drawing.

Keywords— Drawing, CAD, Tyre, Mould.

Fig. 1. Tyre mould construction

I. INTRODUCTION
Development of a new tyre model takes several phases
from conceptual design, detail design, mould development
and fabrication, production trial and testing, until
homologation according to the international and destination
country standards. According to the author experience
working in a tyre manufacturing company, preparing the
drawing of mould design normally takes 5 to 10 working
days, or even more for more complex pattern. After a
design verification and simulation, the drawing then is sent
to mould maker to manufacture the mould that takes 50 to
60 working days. Later on, it takes another 10 to 30 working
days for production trial and performance testing.
A. Mould Cavity
Mould cavity is the inner shape of the tyre mould. The
contour of mold cavity follows the shape and dimension of
the design tyre with certain allowance such as moulding
shrinkage and tyre inflation pressure.
The tyre dimension should comply with international
standards, particularly TRA (Tire and Rim Association) and
ETRTO (European Tyre and Rim Technical Organization).
For example, the tyre size designation of 195/65 R15.
According to ETRTO standard [1] its dimension is as shown
in Table I.

One way to reduce the development time is reducing

TABLE I. TYRE SPECIFICATION
mould drawing lead time by automating mould drawing
generation. For that purpose, the author developed an
algorithm to automate the CAD system (CATIA V5) to Tyre Dimension Rim Load Capacity Inflation
(mm) Width (kg) Pressure (bar)
generate the necessary drawing needed for mould (inch)
fabrication. Section Overall Std. Reinf. Std. Reinf.
Width Diameter
II. T YRE M OULD D ESIGN
201 635 6.0 615 690 2.5 2.9
Unlike plastic moulding or die casting processes where
they use core and cavity plates, tyre moulding process only
uses cavity part.
When the mould closes, a bladder located inside mould There is of course a tolerance in tyre dimension from the
expands and presses the uncured tyre (called green tyre) above design dimension, so that the maximum service of
against the mold cavity. The bladder with high pressure section width is 209 mm and overall diameter is 645 mm.
presses the uncured rubber into the pattern inside the inner
surface of the mold. To maintain high temperature inside the B. Tread Pattern Design
mould, a super-heated steam is circulated around the mould The tread is a tyre surface that makes contact with the
and within the 10 to 20 minutes depending on the size of the road, it provides the needed traction for driving, cornering,
tyre. This high temperature causes a chemical reaction to and braking.

978-1-7281-5192-2/19/$31.00©2019 IEEE
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 During the vulcanization or curing process, a pattern is
molded into the tread. The tread pattern is design to enable
water to escape from the footprint, to provide good traction,
uniform wear, and low noise.
The tread compound has an important role in
maintaining the balance between handling, traction, wear,
and rolling resistance [2].
However, the tyre noise is greatly affected by pattern
design; particularly block shape, size, and void ratio [3]. The
design forms the pattern consisted of grooves and sipes.
C. Tyre Type
The tyre mould design also considers the tyre types, for
each type it has its unique calculation. The types of tyre are
generally refereed as bias and radial.
Bias tyres have cords of body ply placed from bead to
bead at angles less than 90º to the centerline. Bias tyre is
simple in construction and easier to manufacture. However,
it generates more heat and poor wear appearance.
Radial tyres have cords of body ply placed radially from
bead to bead at 90º to the centerline. To add strength and
stability, two steel belts or more are place diagonally in the
tread area. Radial tyre generates less heat, better high speed
performance, and lower rolling resistance. More stiffness on
tread due to belt application gives better handling and
improves wear performance. This complex construction
requires higher costs of material and manufacturing.
D. Mould Type
Generally, there are two types of tyre mould, namely
segmented mould and two piece mould. The design need to
accommodate the different requirement of each type.
However, at this point of time, the research does not
consider the said type of moulds.
(a)
(b)
Fig. 2. Tyre mold type (a) Segmented Mold (b) Two Piece Mold
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III. DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY
The design procedure begins with identifying the size
and specification of tyre being design. Next, the mould
cavity will be generated automatically in CAD system
according to the specified input. Finally, the pattern design
for complete tyre is also generated.
A. Tyre Specification
The information needed to start generating mould
drawing is related to tyre dimension, rim diameter, load
index, speed symbol, and whether it uses rim guard or not.
As it is seen in Fig. 3, when the input has completed and
the user presses OK button, the system searches the
necessary parameters and display the complete
specification underneath and ready for generating mould
cavity contour.
Fig. 3. Tyre specification input
B. Mould Cavity Contour
To start generating mould cavity contour, the system
retrieves parameter information from database and
calculating parameters not available in the database.
To automatically draw the mould cavity contour in
CATIA software, the following automatic steps are
performed:
1. Run the program, if CATIA is not open then open
CATIA or else do the next step.
2. Open Mould Cavity Contour dialog box (see Fig. 4),
the tyre parameters read from database and
calculated parameters are displayed. The parameters
read from database can be edited to suit to the
design need, then the calculated parameters will be
updated according to the edited parameter.
3. To continue, open a new empty drawing space.
4. Create the first contour with R1 radius.
5. Create the second contour with R2 radius
6. Create the corner with radius R
 7. Create Top Side contour with calculated radius,
taken into account the overall width OW
8. Create Bottom Side contour with calculated radius
9. Create Toe Ring contour, taking into account the
mould base width (MBW)
The contour calculation begin with defining the arc
centre point, that is located at X= 0 and Y = SH - OD/2,
where SH is Section Height and OD is Overall Diameter
taken from ETRTO table (Table 1).
Fig. 4. Mould Cavity Contour dialog box
Next, the start angle is calculated based on the tread
width (TW) as illustrated in Fig.5, hence
Start angle = π /2 – α (rad) (1)
where α = arc tan (0.3 TW /R1)
Fig. 5. Start Angle calculation
Since the contour ended at the middle, the end angle is
equal to π/2 rad. Therefore the contour is drawn using the
following CATIA API command:
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Set Arc_1 = factory2D.CreateCircle(X, Y, R1,
start_angle, end_angle)
The rest of the contours are calculated and drawn in
CATIA using the same way. Upon completion of
calculation, the system generate drawing using CATIA
CAD system consisting of contours and lines. The contour
is drawn by defining the arc centre, arc radius, start angle,
end angle, and the line is defined by start point and end
point.
C. Tread Ring
The tread ring is generated from the parameters shown
in Fig. 6. The parameters depend on the mould container
type and dimension. Several parameters are editable but
parameters in blue boxes are calculated.
Fig. 6. Tread Ring dialog box
D. Tread Pattern
Prior to generating drawing of tread pattern, it is
necessary to determine the pitch sequence arrangement
according to the required noise level. The pitch sequence
arrangement can be obtained from simulation result, as
shown in Fig. 7 [3].
Fig. 7. Pitch Sequence obtained from noise simulation software
The pitch sequence then copied into the Pitch
Sequence dialog box as in Fig. 8 and the system generate
the pitch sequence arrangement drawing as in Fig. 11.

Fig. 8 Pitch Sequence Arrangement dialog box
The algorithm to generate pitch sequence drawing is
done using the following loop:
for i = 1 to NumOfPitch
PitchName = "Pitch " & cstr(i)
Set myDitto = myDrawing.Sheets.Item ("Pitch
Detail").Views.Item(PitchName)
x= x + PL(i)
Set Pattern = PatternSheet.Views.ActiveView.
Components.Add(myDitto, x, y)
where x is the last coordinate of x and PL is pitch length of
each pitch. It uses ditto method as it is assumed that the
pitch pattern is a pre-defined design and the system is
utilized to automatically draw the pattern in a sequence
according to the input.
IV. RESULT AND DISCUSSION
To generate mould cavity drawing, press “Continue”
button from Mould Cavity dialog box (Fig. 4). The resulted
drawing is shown in Fig. 9. The dimension was then added
to the drawing for result verification purpose.
Fig. 9. Mould Cavity Contour automatic drawing
The tread ring was also generated according to the input
in Tread Ring dialog box and the result is shown in Fig. 10.
The dimension was also added for verification.
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Fig. 10. Tread Ring profile
Similarly, the pitch sequence was also arranged and
drawn according to the input automatically. The sequence
input is in the following order:
1-1-3-2-4-2-3-3-1-3-4-2-1-1-2-2-4-4-3-2-1-1-3-4-4-1-3-
1-1-2-1-2-3-4-4-1-1-3-2-4-5-1
The number shown above is Pitch number, so that the
order is P2-P1-P1- …. The whole circumferential tyre
surface is made up of 42 pitches in total. Some part of the
sequence is shown in Fig. 11.
The verification has been done by comparing the
parameters in the drawing with the parameter input in dialog
box and it shows compliance between them. Several
different tyre sizes have been tested and the result was
consistent. Therefore, the program was successfully tested
and did the job very well. The total time took to complete
the complete drawing is less than 2 hours.
Fig. 11. Pitch Sequence arrangement
V. CONCLUSION
The development of automatic drawing for tyre mould
design has been carried out to run with CATIA CAD
software. The testing has been done and the system was
successfully doing the jobs.
Generating mould drawing using the newly developed
program took less than two hours to complete one mould
drawing. It is significantly shorten the time needed to
make drawing using CAD manually that takes 5 to 10
working days.

To improve the performance of this program, further

works is needed to include mold type and side plate design
into the system.

REFERENCES
[1] The European Tyre and Rim Technical Organization, “ETRTO
Standards Manual 2018,” Brussels, 2018.
[2] A. N. Gent and J. D. Walter, Ed., “The Pneumatic Tire,” National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration, US Department of
Transportation, Washington DC, August 2005, pp.3-9.
[3] N. A. Sutisna and F. Gapsari, “Rolling Resistance and Noise
Estimation for Product Design and Development of Eco-Tyre
using Finite Element and Numerical Method,” IOP Publishing,
International Conference on Mechanical Engineering Research
and Application, 2019.

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