Crown shape optimization for enhancing tire wear performance by ANN

Tire wear performance is influenced majorly by the distribution of contact pressure with ground, and which is in turn dominated by the shape of tire tread called crown contour. So, the optimum crown shape design is essential for improving the tire wear performance, however it encounters a difficulty of long CPU time when the sensitivity analysis invokes the direct FEM analysis. As a remedy for resolving this numerical problem, we present a crown shape optimization by employing an artificial neural network (ANN). As well, we introduce the non-uniform weighting factors in the objective function definition, in order to effectively obtain an optimum crown contour which provides the contact pressure distribution close an ideal one. Through the illustrative numerical experiments, we assess the CPU-time efficiency and the reliability of the numerical optimization method presented.