Prediction of tire natural frequency with consideration of the enveloping property

A lumped tire model was developed with consideration of the enveloping property in order to predict the natural tire frequency. Tire stiffness was classified into vertical, sidewall, and enveloping stiffnesses, and the tire characteristics were analyzed in detail experimentally and via finite element analysis. In addition, the effective masses of the tire tread and belt were extracted directly from design specifications taking into account the sizes and material properties of different rubber blocks. Using the design parameters of the tires, natural frequencies were calculated from the derived model and were compared with experimental results. Finally, based on good agreement with experimental results, sensitivity analysis was performed to verify the effect of tire stiffnesses on the natural frequencies.