The Yokohama Rubber Co. developed a simulation technology for designing rubber materials. The new technology was developed to support innovative thinking about rubber material design. The new technology is the latest in a series of innovative technologies developed by Yokohama Rubber.
Tyre performance is greatly affected by the complex morphology in the rubber material, i.e., the dispersion and quantity of polymer (rubber) and filler (carbon black and silica, etc.). The new multi-objective design exploration simulation technology differs from the previous simulation methods that assumed the use of actual rubber materials.
Instead, the new simulation technology creates rubber material models based on virtual morphologies, thus enabling simulations of various morphologies. By changing the morphological parameters (variables), the new simulation technology enables us to create huge-scale simulation models consisting of about one billion elements having various morphologies.
A performance evaluation run on the TSUBAME2.5 supercomputer in the Tokyo Institute of Technology, confirmed that the new simulation technology can complete huge-scale computations consisting of one billion elements in just 75 minutes, a feat previously unheard of when using the finite element method.
Multi-objective design exploration is a technique for deducing knowledge useful to the design process. It focuses on organisms’ evolutionary processes and uses a multi-objective genetic algorithm to search for more optimal solutions.
Yokohama Rubber’s past use of multi-objective design exploration to determine the optimal structural design for its tyres has produced some useful results, including the development of Yokohama’s flagship low fuel consumption tyre, the “BluEarth-1 EF20,”which has been assigned a AAA rating for rolling resistance and an “a” rating for wet grip performance, the highest ratings assigned by Japan’s tyre labeling system for each of those tyre performance categories.