Hankook Tire: The Future of Tyre Design

The high performance tyre of the future will be very different to the tyres we drive on today, if the results of a recent design competition are a guide.

A Hankook Tire competition in the US has challenged some of the country's brightest industrial design students to imagine the role of tyres in automotive design from new angles.

The winning entry by University of Cincinnati student Ben Zavala took the brief somewhat literally, with his Tiltread car tyre rolling into corners at an angle like a motorcycle tyre.

Zavala's breakthrough idea was to split the tyre into three parallel ring sections, each mounted on a corresponding split section of wheel.

As the wheel turns and leans, the three tyre sections are individually raised or lowered, allowing them all to maintain traction with the road surface.

Tiltread's wheels are hubless and contain an electric drive motor which varies power to each tyre section, allowing the sections to spin at different rates during cornering.

University of Cincinnati associate professor Ralph Zammit said the competition demonstrated just how great an impact improvement in tyre design could have upon the overall efficiency, ecology and economy of road transportation.

"Hankook proposed a very challenging assignment that provided the students with real-world insights as to how tyres are currently designed, manufactured and the performance issues they must address," said associate professor Zammit.

"Students were especially encouraged to consider sustainability needs such as reducing and reusing raw materials."

Second place in the competition was taken by Mark Hearn who imagined an off-road tyre called Motiv, which features numerous height-variable, non-pneumatic tread blocks that can adapt to extremely rough terrain without risk of blow-out.

Third-placed Miranda Steinhauser's proposal for an eco-friendly tyre also impressed the competition judges.

The Tessela tyre's easily removable tread components allow consumers to replace worn-out tread when required, rather than the whole tyre carcass, reducing tyre waste and landfill.

Models of the first, second and third placed tyres were displayed on the Hankook stand at the 2012 SEMA automotive show in Las Vegas.

[edmaluf]

Cool. I'd be impressed if only one of these entered production. Let alone all four.

[gjms]

This is too awesome. Kudos to Hancock for making this! I love the concept of maglev in a tire! I just hope it doesn't end up in the concept stage.

[HULK-HOGAN]

The chunky tyre looks to be the most costly and risky. There would be so much technology and mechanical components incorporated into a single tyre. Each separate plate needs to be strong enough to handle the shock of a car travelling at high speeds, running over rocks. If one plate hits a rock at a bad angle, it would probably break unless each plate had the strength of a commercial airliner hydraulic behind it lol. If they manage to pull it off, I'd be very impressed.

[pyrespirit]

It alters the tyres' interaction with static friction and allows the normal force of the car to play a much greater role in creating grip. Normally in a car's tyre, the normal force is always perpendicular from the ground, but by altering the way the tyre moves to allow for it to bank with the car, you decrease transverse displacement and increase the effective grip.

[baggedandblown]

Because under normal circumstances a tire is not making full contact with the road during cornering, which is why camber adjustments and low profile tires are needed. Even with negative camber, you're gaining friction to the roads surface on the outside wheel, but losing it on the inside wheel. Camber will also reduce traction under acceleration, due to limited contact with the roads surface. Theoretically, this system could provide optimum surface area for each tire under any circumstance.

[gregmossed]

Getting the tire's camber to match the road surface during hard cornering is a tough suspension issue and imposes a number of limits on other settings. If the wheel itself can adapt to the camber angle changing when the car leans, the suspension can do less of the work and theoretically more grip is available both then, and in other situations less compromised by the need to tune for cornering camber.

[superdude]

Normal tires press downward with force, thus resulting in some of the tire not being fully pressed to the concrete on extreme cornering. Look up Touring Car championship races and watch the tires during extreme cornering. With these it will be able to apply force at an angle so the maximum grip is always achieved.

[TonicEnergy]

You can't efficiently achieve something this high-tech without conceptualized designs. Maybe one day you'll understand.

[allrightsreserved]

Good point. This company would need some sort of copper torroidal coil outside of the wheels central hub that it is magnetically being repelled on. And then by inducing several kilahertz of high frequency sinusoidal wave patterns through that torroid copper coil kind of like a basic amplifier for sound. At which point the induction of high frequency could keep the electromagnetic field from every slipping if tuned correctly to its gauss field accordingly and its P sub prime field to match waves.

[JoshCA]

if the magnetic tire does that, then what's the point of the 'speed bump'? lol

[amnsrg]

nice vision :) ... but nicer soundtrack :P name plz :)

[baggedandblown]

How would they combat the problem of having the outer rim simply slipping out from the hub in the electromagnetically driven wheel?

[Aldahandi]

Who needs speed bumps when you have swag ?

[EnergyReturnWheel]

In the real world you will find the need for a strong resilient hoop structure for high speed applications. We at ERW are using stretched attachments between hub and hoop to generate screw force accumulation and return. Energy is drawn to points...We then lever off those points.

[slathas]

Dont need this... but want this very much!

[TheVariag]

Ресурс играет роль. Такие шины думаю будут рассчитаны на сотни тысяч км. Так что машину вместе с шинами будешь покупать на всю жизнь.)

[dev_and_journey]

Cool music, please write the name of track !!

[avada]

I also fail to see how that magnetic tire would would get the torque. It won't magically roll by itself for sure.
Maybe if the hub has windings in it. And the rim acts as a rotor for an electric motor.

[BerkayTemiz]

How can magnet tyre spin it seems impossible and if it turns how could that stop?

[iyourfatherla]

I seriously have thought about the magnet repulsion tyre long time ago. My problem is just that, how do you make sure the tyre wouldn't slip off to the side?