Optical Technique for Measuring Tire Deformation and Strains - Preliminary Results 941178

The main objective of this research was to apply an optical technique called fringe projection to quantifying the aircraft tire deformation and strains. The proposed fringe projection technique, using a single light source and a grating, requires no image superposition. Thus, the measurement is not very sensitive to vibration. Three different types of tires in static and dynamic conditions, subjected to different amounts of tire deflections, were tested. A common practice in three dimensional optical measurement is that a fixed reference plane has to be established, from which a fixed reference point is selected. The main technical difficulty in this research is that a tire subjected to an applied load not only moves and rotates, but deforms as well. Therefore, the selected reference point changes its position in three dimensions all the time.

The experimental results indicate that the proposed measuring system is suitable for measuring tire deformation and strains, but requires some additional devices. Although the goal of this project is to accurately quantify the three dimensional geometry of deformed tires subjected to various operating conditions, only the results from two dimensional tire deformation analysis are being reported.