Tire wear testing programme

Applus IDIADA has developed its own tyre wear test procedure, which is focused on three main factors for the wear test: 

• Vehicle set up: Vehicle’s load condition, tyre pressure, tyre balance, are always controlled and configured with the right settings at the beginning, during and end of the test to ensure the same vehicle configuration. Tests can be conducted with more than one vehicle to compare different tyres (with same dimensions), rotating the tyres’ positions or between vehicles to regulate the wear of the tyres. 

• Test conditions: Different driving profiles are tested and proposed to offer the proper test type conditions in percentage. City, highway, country, mountain, and off-road testing conditions are key to configure a wear test, always using the same route definition. Road and weather conditions are also noted and measured to analyse them. IDIADA has developed its own testing programmes depending on the severity required from the customer. 

• Driving severity: The driving mode to which the test vehicle is exposed to has also a direct effect on tyre wear. Therefore, all testing vehicles are previously instrumented with accelerometers to acquire the longitudinal and lateral forces to obtain the “severity” level of each route, minimizing the differences between driving styles as well as assessing the impact of acceleration on tyre wear with specific measurements. The severity level is a statistical number obtained from the raw accelerometer value. 

• Tyre measurements we perform: The wear, hardness, weight, temperature, heel-and-toe are measured with different mileage intervals (initial, intermediate and final measurements) to obtain the tyre wear test results. All the previous data is monitored and controlled during the whole procedure to avoid misleading results.