Tires play an extremely important role in the operation of a vehicle as they transmit forces between the ground and the vehicle. Consistent efforts have been made over the years towards modeling and simulation of tires and more recently, there has been an increasing need to understand the transient response of tires to various high-frequency events such as anti-lock braking and short-wavelength disturbances from the road. Major thrust has been provided by the tire industry to develop simulation models that accurately predict the dynamic response of tires without the use of computationally intensive tools such as FEA.

The objective of this research is to explain the development, implementation and validation of a simulation tool based on a dynamic tire model that would assist in the analysis of the effect of tire belt vibrations on the braking performance of a vehicle. A rigid ring tire model, tandem elliptical cam enveloping model and a rule-based ABS model have been developed for this purpose. These were combined together in a quarter vehicle model and implemented in Matlab-Simulink. These models were developed for adaptation with CarSim to provide a simulation tool that can be utilized in both tire and vehicle design processes. In addition to model implementation, a parameterization procedure was developed to estimate the parameters of the rigid ring tire and enveloping model based on experimental data for a given tire. Validation studies have also been performed to ensure the accuracy and validity of the tire model. Following this, the braking performance of ABS under different road surfaces were evaluated. Based on the simulation results, final conclusions were drawn with regards to the analysis and detailed recommendations for future work directed towards the improvement of the tool were provided.