xpensive wrote:Jersey Tom wrote:
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But no, this has nothing to do with heating up tires or anything temperature related. Traction effectively comes directly from energy loss. Better read up on that *.pdf, bud!
Afraid I'm at a loss here. If traction "effectively comes directly from energy-loss" as you say, but without "heating up tyres",
what's the function of said loss and what happens to that energy anyway? A three-line crash-course perhaps?
Where do you think marbles come from? If you take an rubber eraser and rip it in half chances are it's warmer than before you started...
To be a little more helpful, there's two things going on. When you generate lateral force you have to have a slip angle (and therefore a sliding speed) force x speed is N x m/s i.e. work done per second aka power in watts. Integrate that w.r.t time and you have N.m i.e. work done aka energy.
In the case of "grip" that process is mainly going on on the surface of the tyre. If the rubber can't deal with that energy input if will break down, wear out, grain, or all manner of other things.
As all that's occurring on the tread surface the tyre is rolling. As a portion of the tyre enters the contact patch it will compress and then extend as it leaves the contact patch. This deformation tends to be in the upper sidewall and base of the tread (think cantilever beam - bending moment is highest at the base) due to visco-elastic properties of rubber this deformation causes energy to be dissipated resulting in heat buildup.
There is only so much you can do to decouple the two mechanisms (particularly what's occuring at the tread base) when the tread is a matter of mm thick.
Ben