Abstract
Due to the rapid increase of long-distance transportation, particular attentions have been paid to truck tires, especially to their dynamic characteristics. In this research, experimental modal analysis on two kinds of light-duty truck tires, i.e., radial tire and bias tire, are performed by using GRFP(global rational fraction polynomial) method to investigate differences of the dynamic behavior of the two tires. The test results have shown that the modal frequencies of bias tire are much higher than the corresponding values of radial tire with a similar mode shape, which is in accordance with the fact that the radial rigidity of bias tire is higher than that of radial tire. And most of the modal decay rates of bias tire are larger than those of radial tire within the scope of this experiment. In the frequency domain range of test, the bias tire has extra modes, which do not occur in the radial tire. This difference is based on the fact that the circumferential rigidity of the bias tire is quire low whereas that of radial tire is so high that the frequencies of the corresponding modes are out of the frequency range of test.