Determine Effects of Tire Size and Inflation Pressure on Tire Contact Pressure and Primary Pavement Responses to Loading

Project Description

Recent years have seen an increase in the number of permitted oversized and overweight loads on Texas highways. A number of tire sizes are used by the motor carrier industry in transporting oversized and overweight loads. Tire inflation pressures for these transports are often higher than those used for regular line hauling to match the higher wheel loads of the overweight truck or trailer.

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) funded a project with TTI to

• characterize tire contact stresses for various tire types, loads, and inflation pressures;
• evaluate the effects of tire construction, load, and inflation pressure on pavement response;
• develop a methodology for estimating tire contact stresses; and
• establish how such stresses may be represented in existing layered elastic analysis programs to achieve a better approximation of the effects of non-uniform tire contact stresses on performance-related pavement response variables.

Literature review findings were used to assemble available data on tire contact stresses and to set up a test plan for additional measurements that were made in this project. A database was created to capture this information.

Using the results from analyses of measured tire contact stresses, researchers developed a computer program called TireView that estimates tire contact area as a function of tire type, load, and inflation pressure and predicts the stress distribution at the tire-pavement interface based on polynomial interpolations of measured tire contact stresses in the database.

Project Publications

Evaluation of Effects of Tire Size and Inflation Pressure on Tire Contact Stresses and Pavement Response 0-4361-1

Summary Report: Evaluation of Effects of Tire Size and Inflation Pressure on Tire Contact Stresses and Pavement Response 0-4361-S

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