Should a Vehicle Always Deviate to the Tire Blowout Side?—A New Tire Blowout Model With Toe Angle Effects

Abstract

As a severe tire failure, tire blowout during driving can significantly threaten vehicle stability and road safety. Tire blowout models were developed in the literature to conclude that a vehicle always deviates to the tire blowout side. However, this conclusion is proved to be inaccurate in this paper, since one important factor was largely ignored in the existing tire blowout models. Toe angle, as a basic and widely applied setup on ground vehicles, can provide preset and symmetric lateral tire forces for normal driving. However, when tire blowout occurs, different toe angle setups can impact vehicle motions in different ways. For the first time, the toe angle is explicitly considered and integrated into a tire blowout model in this paper. For different tire blowout locations, driving maneuvers, and drivetrain configurations, the impacts of different toe angle setups on the variations of tire friction forces and vehicle motions are analyzed. The developed tire blowout model with toe angles is validated through both high-fidelity carsim simulation results and experimental results of a scaled test vehicle. Both simulation and experimental results show that a vehicle may not deviate to the tire blowout side, depending on the toe angle setups and driving maneuvers. Moreover, the experimental results also validate that the proposed tire blowout model can accurately evaluate the tire blowout impacts on vehicle dynamics.