Abstract
The recent well publicized failures of the Firestone ATX tire has brought to light the poor state of research into the basic physical causes of such failures and the poor state of research into analytic methods suitable for analyzing such failures. The essence of problems of this nature lies in the finite deformation fatigue fracture of elastomers at large strains. The definition of failure criteria is further complicated by the issue of material aging. The computational problem itself is rather demanding due to the truly 3-D nature of the tire system under load. In particular, the computation of the failure forces (the singular energy momentum tractions) is rather challenging due to the spinning reference state normally utilized in tire analysis. In this paper we present a suitable numerical formulation for computing energy release rates in cracked tires and apply this to the question of the effect of varying inter-belt ply gauges. It is found that the energy release rates increase in the example tire for an increasing inter-belt gauge which seems to be in contradiction to the typical field experience of longer life for larger gauges. The contradiction however can be explained through a size effect argument related to the process zone around the crack-tip which causes the critical energy release rate to increase with gauge at a rate faster than the available energy release rate.
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Govindjee, S. (2003). Finite Deformation Fracture of Tires. In: Miehe, C. (eds) IUTAM Symposium on Computational Mechanics of Solid Materials at Large Strains. Solid Mechanics and Its Applications, vol 108. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0297-3_38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0297-3_38
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-6239-0
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