Tyres Receive ‘Full Medical’ with New Conti Scanner

Continental is employing a new CT scanner to further improve the testing of prototype tyres. This new piece of equipment is being set up at the company’s research and development centre in Hanover, Germany. According to Conti, the CT scanner greatly reduces the time needed to screen a tyre and enhances the quality of images taken during the process. Individual components of a tyre’s construction can be displayed separately enabling, for example, tests for wear in individual parts of the casing to be undertaken. Around 3,000 tyres are to undergo the testing process annually.

Continental’s team of specialists has been inspecting test tyres using a computer tomography scanner for over ten years. This scanner allows individual materials contained in the tyres to be displayed without damaging the tyre and therefore supplements other test options such as X-rays or visual inspections. The scan focuses on the distortion of reinforcing materials such as steel cords and their exact position in the tyre. Tyre distortion when cornering, braking and under heavy loads is also simulated and displayed.

The new equipment will increase by tenfold the number of tyres that can be screened in this way, Continental reports. “We can now offer our tyre developers a much greater capacity than before,” said Andre Baumgart, the project manager. “As well as being able to analyse tyres more quickly, the new scanner’s higher resolution is also a great advantage. We can also simulate realistic conditions such as wheel load, camber, drift, acceleration and braking torque and examine the effects these have on the different parts of the tyre.” This allows individual parts of the tyre to be analysed in 3D and in the context of the tyre as a whole. The equipment previously used could only show individual sections or slices of the whole tyre – now the technicians can see a 3D view of a larger area made up of several individual sections, until now a time-consuming task.

Continental reports it is currently the only tyre manufacturer able to inspect the effect of various loads on the bond between reinforcing materials and rubber with this level of precision, and therefore its tyre developers can construct products to meet the most demanding requirements.