On the 3D normal tire/off-road vibro-contact problem with friction

In this paper, a virtual experiment concerning driving on off-roads is investigated via 3D normal vibro-contact problem with friction. The dynamic road concept is introduced in order to characterize a particular stretch of road by total longitudinal, lateral, and normal forces and their geometric distributions in the contact patches. The off-road profiles are built by image sonification technique. The cross-sectional curves of off-roads before and after deformation, the contact between the tire and the road, the distribution of contact and friction forces in the contact domain, the natural frequencies and modes when the tire is in ground contact, are estimated. The approach is exercised on two particular problems and results compare favorably to existing analytical and numerical solutions. The feasibility of image sonification technique is useful to build a low-cost virtual reality environment with an increased degree of realism for driving simulators and higher user flexibility.