SRI’s Falken system signals loose wheels to the driver
Wheels falling off vehicles may not be the first thing you think of when it comes to road safety, but it does happen and it is well documented.
A two-phase project carried out by The Transport Road Laboratory between 2006 and 2010 found that between 7,500 and 10,000 cases of loose wheel nuts on heavy vehicles were reported annually during that period and that 150 to 400 wheel detachments were reported annually in the UK took place. . There were between 10 and 27 accidents resulting in injuries and three to seven fatal accidents.
Part of the problem in some markets is believed to be the higher frequency of wheel changes as drivers switch between winter and summer tires, increasing the likelihood of an under-tightened wheel nut.
In Japan it has become a newsworthy topic and something that the government takes very seriously. As a result, Sumitomo Rubber Industries (SRI), owner of the Falken Tire brand, came up with an idea for detecting loose wheels on cars and trucks without special hardware.
The technology, called Sensing Core, is completely software-based and has the added benefit of being installable into the software of vehicle ECUs.
When ABS was invented, the accurate measurement of the rotational speed of individual wheels was introduced, allowing software to detect when a wheel locked up. The feeling of lateral acceleration and other factors grew with the advent of stability control and tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMS) that are now mandatory on new cars and light trucks in Britain.
SRI says the Sensing Core software evolved from the original Deflation Warning System (DWS), which is an indirect form of TPMS and works based on the rotational speed of the tires.
DWS is used by 15 OEMs in Europe, Japan, China and India, so information is already available and flying around on the CAN data bus of modern vehicles. It also gives an indication of tire slip on the road surface.
SRI engineers discovered that wheel vibration causes variations in that data when a wheel nut loosens by a millimeter or more, signaling this to the driver in the same way as low tire pressure.
The new technology is part of SRI’s overall Smart Tire Concept, aimed at collecting a variety of information, such as road and weather conditions, and sharing it with the wider fleet via the cloud. The company also plans to use Sensing Core for cloud-based tire wear monitoring.
The idea is that details about vehicle usage are passed to cloud-based software, which uses them to predict tire wear and alert drivers or fleet managers when a tire replacement is likely.
Other tire manufacturers, including Continental and Pirelli, are also investing heavily in smart tire research and the technology is likely to play an important role in improving safety in the future.
Sensing Core will be introduced as standard equipment by an automaker this year, and while SRI isn’t revealing which one yet, it seems likely the technology will appear in Japan first.
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