Simulation method for vehicle tire water spraying behavior

The consideration of vehicle soiling in the development process becomes ever more important because of the increasing customer demands on current vehicles and the greater use of camera and sensor systems due to autonomous driving. In the process of self-soiling a soil-water-mix deposits on the vehicle surface which is thrown up by the rotation of the car´s own wheels. The validation of functions in vehicle development usually takes place in an experimental manner, but is increasingly supported by numerical simulations.In these simulations the whirl up process is modelled by a static wheel where the droplets start tangentially from homogenous emitter lines on the tire surface. This represents a significant simplification of the central boundary condition of the whole selfsoiling simulation.This study presents a new approach for the direct simulation of the droplet whirl up process of a single rotating wheel, based on the meshfree Finite Pointset Method (FPM). A more realistic droplet field is thus obtained which consequently leads to a more realistic simulation of vehicle self-soiling. In this study the plausibility of the new approach is evaluated using a down-scaled tire model. The approach is additionally validated in a comparison to experimental results.