Automotive engineers use sophisticated techniques to design tread patterns and material formulations, but there is no substitute for realistic testing. Engineers from a leading tire manufacturer wanted to see what the normal bumps and shakes encountered during actual driving would do to their tire's contact patch. To simulate this, they drove the car onto 4 independent 3-axis shaker tables. Their problem was that they needed a tactile sensor that could deliver the 1mm resolution needed while being fast and rugged enough to withstand the extreme forces generated between the sensing surface and the tires. After examining all the possible solutions, they turned to PPS.
PPS delivered a high-speed industrial sensor array wide enough to accommodate a full-sized automobile tire, durable enough to handle the extreme shear forces generated during shaking, and fast enough to accurately capture the dynamic changes in the tread patterns. The system included integrated signal conditioning electronics which processed the data at a frame rate of over 200 Hz to fully capture the applied impulses. Our Chameleon software allowed client engineers to visualize the footprint in real-time with synchronized video while capturing the entire data stream for further analysis.
The following video shows PPS tire tread measurement software in action (0:24):
Measurement & Instrumentation