Measurement of the large strain behaviour of aircraft tyre rubber

The paper describes mechanical property tests on a Concorde aircraft tyre rubber. The tyre rubber is taken from the tyre tread, and consists of nylon reinforcement, laid up in an angle ply form. The constitutive behaviour of the rubber is characterised using the Mooney Rivlin approach, in which deformation is expressed in terms of strain energy. Static and dynamic tensile tests are conducted along the major reinforcement and minor reinforcement axes in the plane of the tread, and compression tests are conducted through the tread thickness. This data is then input into a finite element model of the tyre, using DYNA.