Pneumatic tires play a greater role in vibration control of vehicles with stiff or no suspension systems. The challenge is to find an approach that enhances vibratory damping in the tires without increasing the power losses due to rolling resistance effects. This paper presents a novel tire damping enhancement that allows for improved damping within the tire while maintaining the rolling resistance found in a typical pneumatic tire.
The damping enhancement was evaluated by testing an apparatus/demonstrator that simulates a pneumatic tire. The experiment was initially configured to measure the damping ratio of the conventional tire design using a calibrated external excitation and analyzing the decay of the vibration. The damping enhancement presented in the paper was then subjected to the same test and analysis procedure. Results of the analysis show that the proposed damping enhancement measurably decreased the time of the vibratory oscillation.