Air-filled (pneumatic) tires give our vehicles comfortable, cushiony rides. Looking at it from another perspective, pneumatic tires are containers of pressurized gas that are being subjected to constant abuse, and when something happens to them, it can result in a situation that falls somewhere between a minor annoyance and a deadly catastrophe. We\u2019ve ridden on\u00a0these things for about 130 years now, and while they\u2019ve improved substantially since John Dunlop\u00a0invented them\u00a0to keep his kid from getting headaches while riding his bike, it seems that we can still do better.\u00a0Hankook is trying to make better happen with a consumer-oriented airless tire.<\/p>\n
Instead of pressurized air as a shock absorber that can also support the weight of the vehicle,\u00a0airless tires (also called non-pneumatic tires, or NPTs) use deformable solid materials (usually rubber) to achieve the same effects.<\/p>\n
There are already airless tires in production: Michelin sells the\u00a0Tweel\u00a0for agricultural vehicles, and Polaris has been offering an\u00a0ATV with NPTs\u00a0since late 2013.\u00a0What\u2019s new is Hankook\u2019s announcement that it has been aggressivley testing its NPT for applications that require more than\u00a0low-speed ruggedness. Among them\u00a0is the passenger vehicle.\u00a0The series of \u201crigorous tests\u201d that the company is putting its tires through are meant to prove their\u00a0durability, hardness (efficiency), stability, ability to take high-speed turns (slalom), and ability to maintain their integrity at high speeds (up to 130 kilometers per hour). Hankook says that \u201cthe impressive results in all five categories demonstrated that the NPTs could match conventional tires in terms of performance.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s all good stuff, but what\u2019s especially promising is that Hankook has been able to vastly improve the efficiency of its manfacturing process, reducing the number of steps to four from eight. The NPTs are recyclable, too. None of this is any guarantee that Hankook will be releasing a consumer product any time soon;\u00a0it\u2019s going to take a lot of safety testing before this new type of tire is\u00a0allowed on the road. But durability and performance testing and a focus on manufacturability likely means that these tires are (finally) treading beyond the prototype stage.<\/p>\n
Article source by By Evan Ackerman in IEEE Spectrum<\/p>\n
http:\/\/goo.gl\/yn86uP<\/p>\n
http:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/cars-that-think\/transportation\/advanced-cars\/airless-tires-roll-towards-consumer-vehicles\/?utm_source=carsthatthink&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=072215<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Air-filled (pneumatic) tires give our vehicles comfortable, cushiony rides. Looking at it from another perspective, pneumatic tires are containers of pressurized gas that are being subjected to constant abuse, and when something happens to them, it can result in a situation that falls somewhere between a minor annoyance and a deadly catastrophe. We\u2019ve ridden on\u00a0these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":64,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,8],"tags":[22,21,19,20,18],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","category-gallery","category-hello","tag-are","tag-automotive-robotics-engineering","tag-base","tag-binus-aso","tag-greaternusantara"],"featured_image":{"phone":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2016\/04\/Cover0012.jpg","tablet":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2016\/04\/Cover0012.jpg"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65,"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/65"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}