Longitudinal tire dynamics

This article begins with a brief review of the traditional concept of lateral relaxation length. The review illustrates that this concept yields a useful approximation which can be used with semi-empirical tire models which assume lateral forces are a function of steady state slip angles. The article then presents an analogous derivation for longitudinal slip. Like its lateral counterpart, the derivation yields an approximation for transient longitudinal slip which can be used with tire models which assume longitudinal forces are a function of steady-state longitudinal slip. It is shown that, like the relaxation-length-based lateral slip angle, this formulation for longitudinal slip yields the ability to compute shear forces at the tire/road interface for either high or low speed applications, a necessary feature of simulations which support human in the loop driving simulation. Like traditional kinematically-based longitudinal slip, the transient formulation presented here is coupled with the wheel spin equation, and it shares the characteristic that it is very stiff compared to the equations of vehicle motion. This characteristic is a challenge impeding the real-time calculations required for driving simulation. The paper shows that local linearization of the wheel spin equations coupled with analytical solutions of the transient longitudinal slip formulation provide the basis for both insight into the longitudinal dynamics of the tire and for integrating the model in real-time.