Road contact stresses and forces under tires with low inflation pressure

Many field trials have been undertaken to demonstrate the benefits of reducing the inflation pressure of the tires of heavily loaded haul vehicles, but few carefully controlled laboratory studies have been performed. An earlier full scale laboratory study indicated that tire inflation pressure had far less effect on subgrade strains for unpaved, single-layer granular road structures than the tire loading itself, so attention was directed to the behaviour of the granular base at the tire tread - road surface interface. In the present paper, the results of full scale tests performed using a laboratory apparatus designed to measure the dynamic vertical, transverse, and longitudinal contact forces under tires with varying loads and inflation pressures are reported. Vertical contact forces were observed to be highly non-uniform, both across and along the contact patch.