Method for designing pneumatic tires

Abstract

In order to perform tire design and development highly efficiently and provide a tire at low cost, a tire basic model for representing a tire cross-sectional shape including an internal structure and being divided into a plurality of elements, an objective function for representing a physical quantity for evaluation of tire performance, design variables for determining a physical property of rubber members, and a constraint condition for constraining the physical property of the rubber members are determined (100, 102). A value of the objective function and a value of the constraint condition are calculated in accordance with Young's moduli of the rubber members when the design variable is altered by a unit quantity .DELTA.r.sub.i, and a sensitivity is calculated for each of the design variables (106-112). Predicted values of variation quantities of the design variables for maximizing the value of the objective function while satisfying the constraint condition are calculated by using the sensitivity (114). The steps described above are repeated until the value of the objective function converges (118). Young's moduli of the rubber members are determined on the basis of design variables when the value of the objective function converges to a predicted value (120).

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.