Welcome to Fingertips website
Any road vehicle, from the most technological to the most powerful or safe, mainly interacts with the external environment through small contact areas, almost wide as the palms of our hands: tires footprints. Tires play a crucial role in vehicle handling, in road safety and in perspective mobility scenarios. The optimization of the phenomena involved in their contact with ground can lead to deep social, technological and economic advantages. Nevertheless, the knowledge of the contact mechanisms between tire tread and road asphalt is still far from a level of full comprehension, due to the complexity of the nonlinearity of polymers behavior and of the local and microscopic friction phenomena arising at the ground roughness level.
In this context, the main target of FINGERTIPS project is to design, prototype and test innovative tire treads and asphalt bitumens inspired, indeed, to human fingertips, able to modify their shape in wet conditions, increasing their gripping attitude. This ambitious goal will be pursued through the numerical and experimental combination guaranteed by the research consortium including Politechnic University of Bari (PoliBA) and University of Naples (UniNA). The Principal investigator of FINGERTIPS is Prof. Flavio Farroni (UniNA), while the research unit leader at PoliBA is Prof. Carmine Putignano.
IN A NUTSHELL
Vision: The overarching goal of FINGERTIPS is to design, prototype and test innovative tire treads and asphalts inspired byhuman fingertips, indeed, able to modify their shape to improve gripping attitude in wet conditions. The proposed surfaces will be characterized by polar nanoparticles embedded and properly grooved structure, able to increase friction and consequently safety in mobility applications.
Rationale: Tires and road are the main interaction elements between vehicles and external environment. Nevertheless, such round, black and bouncing objects, in contact with a randomly rough rigid substrate are still widely unknown in their deep working mechanisms, due to the multiple and complex physical effects involved in their use, and to the high nonlinearities of phenomena arising at their interface. Current advances in nanostructures, and in measurement, testing and modelling techniques, will represent the driver to the development of novel approaches to micro and nanostructures, both from the chemical and physical points of view, applied to both sides of tire/road contact.
Approach: The adoption of advanced techniques for road roughness analysis, for polymeric compounds modelling and non-destructive viscoelastic characterization, and for tire friction, energy and temperature evaluation from indoor and outdoor data, will allow to build a consistent knowledge, useful to design materials and surfaces able to overcome the criticalities linked to dry and lubricated contact in mobility.
Expected Outcome: Once collected the results from multidisciplinary experimental sessions and physical models, conceived with the aim to highlight and decouple all the physical variabilities involved in tire/road contact, the adoption of data science processing techniques will allow to work on correlations among the concurring effects. Final target: developing and prototype new tire and road surface archetypes, characterized by proper roughness spectra and chemical affinities, able to optimize the mechanics of the tread particles detachment and the vehicles adherence, with an impact on safety and on the transition phase that mobility is facing.
The Specific Research Objectives
Gripping maximization, through an appropriate tuning of the friction, is a key aspect in the reduction of the emergency braking distance and in the increase of in-curve roadholding, with particular reference to low-friction cases, among the first causes in deadly road accidents
Road roughness effects on tire adherence and its continuous monitoring are a too often hidden side of the financial efforts produced by the infrastructure management companies, interested in pavements able to produce high grip in dry and wet conditions, for the longest possible time
Tread wear uniformity, monitoring and inhibition is the main responsible for cost reduction in passenger vehicles and fleet management, and the worn particles detachment highly affects lung diseases and polluting particulates
