Wheel Force Sensor-Based Techniques for Wear Detection and Analysis of a Special Road

Automobile proving ground is important for the research of vehicles which are used for vehicle dynamics, durability testing, braking testing, etc. However, the road in automobile proving grounds will inevitably be damaged with the extension of the service life. In most previous research, equipment similar to a laser profilometer was used to detect the quality of the road, the principle of which is to reflect the quality of the road by measuring the roughness of the pavement. This method ignores the elastic deformation of the road itself when the vehicle is traveling and it is difficult to compensate for the error. Therefore, this paper presents a new method based on a force sensor to reduce the impact of elastic deformation, such as tire deformation, pavement deformation, and wheel rim deformation. In this study, force sensors mounted on the wheels collect the three-dimensional dynamic force of the wheel. The presented method has been tested with two sets of cobblestone road loads, and the result shows that the load intensities imposed by the test vehicle on the target road are 88.3%, 91.0%, and 92.05% of the intensity of the load imposed by the test vehicle on a standard road in three respective dimensions. It is clear that the proposed method has strong potential effectiveness to be applied for wear detection and analysis of a special road.