Mission
Our mission is to improve the Sustainability of road pavements and tires, the safety of road users and the livability of the communities through multi-disciplinary research and innovation in partnership with national amd international organizations.
Background
The current (inter-) national road infrastructure is of paramount social-economic-environmental importance for the current and future society. However, the construction, maintenance and daily use of this infrastructure entails multiple problems with respect to (i) preservation of ecosystems, economic, human, and environmental resources, and (ii) provision of comfort and safety for road users and surrounding communities.
For instance, in the Netherlands, passenger cars produce 25 million tons of carbon dioxide and more than 6000 cubic meter of rubber particulate matter. Further, more than 3 million people suffer from sleep disorders caused by road traffic noise, leading to health problems ranging from high blood pressure to heart and vascular diseases.
The amount of sound pollution, tire and road wear particles, additional fuel consumption due to pavement-vehicle interaction effects and skid resistance (grip) depend largely on the properties and geometries of the tire and road pavement and their interaction. The challenges in concomitantly accommodating the environmental and economic sustainability, safety, and livability needs lies on the conflicting nature of the phenomena involved, in the sense that improvements in one dimension cannot be accomplished without the deterioration of at least one of the other dimensions. For example, a reduction of the rolling resistance (lower greenhouse gas emissions, etc.) can easily lead to a reduction in skid resistance, and thus lead to unsafe situations. A smooth road surface leads to noise abatement, but again at the expense of a reduction in wet skid resistance. Similarly, a wear resistant tire (reduction of rubber particulate matter) can easily lead to more road wear (increase of asphalt particulate matter and therefore of road maintenance).
Worldwide, research works have been carried out to improve tire performance and to develop new innovative road pavements. However, more often than not, these branches of research and knowledge do not work together. For far-reaching results and better solutions, the challenges related to the tire-road contact system must be tackled in a holistic way, with multi-disciplinary lens, and in collaboration with multiple national and international organizations of different kind.
In the tire-road contact system, tire, road pavement and contact surfaces should be modelled and analysed synergistically. Expertise in the following fields is therefore of relevant importance:
- Mechanical behavior of rubber
- Mechanical behavior of road pavements
- Contact/interaction between tire and road pavement surfaces
- Dynamics of tire and road pavement and radiated noise
- Life cycle assessment (LCA) modelling
- Data science and machine learning
At the University of Twente, various research groups bundled their expertise in the Tire-Road Consortium to guarantee an efficient and effective platform for this holistic and multi-disciplinary approach:
