Factors Affecting on the Contact Area of the Retread Truck Tires

Abstract

Retread tire is an old or used tire which rubber tread has been remolded and revulcanized on the tire layer. Retread tire are widely used in truck and bus transportation industries due to benefits in cost saving, reduction of production energy and environment issue in tire recycling and scrap tire reduction. In this work, the factors which affects the contact area of the retread truck tire type 10.00-20 was investigated. The tread pattern BF and CT pattern as well as the inflation pressure of 100, 110, 120 psi are chosen as primary variebles under a fixed condition of the vertical force of 7,300 N. The results show that at the inflation pressure of 100 psi, the largest contact areas are found at 17,630, 16,544 mm2 for BF and CT, respectively. In addition, for range of inflation pressure used in this research, BF tread pattern provides higher contact area than one of CT resulting in possible less tread wear. As a result, this work can be further studied to obtain the correlation between the contact area and tread wear of the retread tire in the near future