EngD position: “Design of a model to predict the wet grip behavior”

The EngD is a 2-year post-master’s degree, technological designers programme. This programme at the University of Twente contains an educational part and a design project. For the project, you will work with an industrial partner. The educational programme will have an in-depth character with ample attention for professional development and will be partly tailored to the design project. Together with the external organisation, you will develop a high-level and creative solution for the given problem.

Wet grip is a crucial performance of tires, related to safety of the passengers in the vehicle. The wet grip performance of tires should be already predicted in the lab during the initial phase of designing the tread compound formulation. The prediction is often based on the dynamic-mechanical analysis of the tread compound and evaluation of its glass transition process. Various ingredients present in the tread compound and their interactions with each other can influence the glass transition process and affect the potential wet grip performance.

The project objectives are to design a model which allows a prediction of the wet grip behavior, depending on the compound formulation. Different compound formulations will be used with different ingredients causing a different glass transition temperature. They will be tested with regard to their dynamic-mechanical behavior in a DMA. The influence of the glass transition process on their dynamic-mechanical response (simulating a rolling tire) in a broad range of temperatures and frequencies will be investigated. This achieved experimental data in this DMA study will be used as a basis for deriving and training a data driven model, which would then be used to predict the wet grip behavior, for a new, alternative, compound formulation.