Experts gather for 4th FTire User Meeting in Aachen

For the 4th time, vehicle engineers and tyre experts from around the world visited Aachen, Germany between 11 and 13 September to exchange experiences of the FTire model and discuss varying applications and future demands for the tyre model together with its creator, Professor Gipser.

This year the seminar focused on all kinds of FTire applications in the CAE process chain, the implementation in HiL test rigs as well as latest findings from automotive research projects or FTire interfacing with third party simulation environments.

In today’s development processes the reduction of time consuming and costly prototype testing are main drivers for the continuously increased usage of simulation tools. At the same time, the requirements regarding the accuracy and the required range of simulations increase as well.

Nowadays alternative fuel vehicle models are not only used to analyze the performance of a vehicle. Moreover, they are used for enhanced durability and ride comfort investigations for instance. These increased requirements obviously also impact today’s tyre models, as the tyre is the only link between the vehicle and the road surface. Therefore most accurate and precise simulation models are essential.

FTire is one of the most common tyre models for the described tasks. It is designed for vehicle comfort simulations on road irregularities even with extremely short wave-lengths. At the same time, it can serve as a physically based, highly nonlinear and dynamic tyre model for handling characteristics under the above mentioned excitation conditions.

In contrast to other widely used tyre models, FTire explains most of the complex tyre phenomena on a mechanical basis – and not merely by mathematical description of measured characteristics.

With its lectures and panels plus the evening reception the FTire User Meeting has established itself as a renowned platform for users and developers to get together and exchange experiences, use cases and ideas for future developments and their requirements with other experts and to induce further developments in this area.

Furthermore, all participants had the opportunity to experience fka’s extensive testing infrastructure including its new MTS Flat-Trac IV CT plus during live demonstrations.