One of the buzz words, or phrases, right now in vehicle dynamics is tyre temperature modelling. I find that mildly amusing as this same subject has come and gone over the last couple of decades, yet every few years someone new pops up claiming a unique angle on the subject.
In fairness, some of them have been quite good, while others have been more a case of what on earth were you thinking?
ChassisSim has had a thermal tyre model since the launch of ChassisSim v3 in 2010, so it would be fair to say I’ve had something of a front row seat at many of these discussions. The purpose of this article, then, is to show you how we can connect all these dots so you can put together a useable thermo’ tyre model.
To kick off this discussion about tyre temperature, we need to get our heads around surface and core tyre temperature. They are not the same thing.
Core subject
Let’s start with core temperature. This is the temperature right at the middle of the carcass of the tyre. This is what drives the pressure of the tyre, and it is very slow moving. Figure 1 is a plot of tyre pressure for an outing of a V8 Supercar, and illustrates this very neatly.
Since this is live customer data, the vertical scales and
