Four tires sitting in the rain with lightning strikes in the background
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Join GCAPS at the International Tire Technology Expo 2025!

GCAPS is excited to announce our attendance at the International Tire Technology Expo on March 4-6, 2025, at Deutsche Messe in Hannover, Germany! Visit us at Booth 4031 in Hall 20 to learn about our best-in-class tire testing facilities and how we can improve your tire and vehicle development process, including our most recent advancements:

TireOps Suite: an end-to-end software solution

Through our experience of more than a decade at the forefront of tire testing, we have developed a suite of software tools handling everything from inventory, test scheduling and execution, data acquisition and processing, and TYDEX creation. We are now offering this software to the market, allowing customers to utilize our own tooling within their workflow.

Tire testing on Asphaltant

Asphaltant: a realistic Flat-Trac surface

Traditionally, tire models are created with a sandpaper surface, but GCAPS has been developing a novel surface: Asphaltant. This more accurately mirrors ‘real’ outdoor surfaces, so that your final tire – and therefore vehicle – models are far more representative of what drivers feel on-track. With the dawn of vehicle simulators being used for virtual tire and vehicle development, this realism has never been more sought after – or more important.

Wet testing and modelling

We first paired our Flat-Trac with a water delivery system in 2016. With multiple upgrades since then, we can deliver water onto the surface with unparalleled control, from a light ‘mist’ all the way up to aquaplaning. This has been an enabler for the recent Siemens MF-Tyre wet extension, for which GCAPS has been a partner.

In addition to our booth, Alex O’Neill and Jon Darab will also be leading two presentations that discuss how GCAPS’ tire and vehicle testing capabilities.

Presentation #1: Indoor testing of tires in wet conditions: a comparison study

📅 When: Day 2, Wednesday, March 5, 2025, at 10:15

Jon Darab will be joining Carlo Lugaro (Siemens Digital Industries Software Netherlands) to give a presentation on key advancements in tire and vehicle dynamics.

Indoor tire testing facility developments offer the opportunity to accurately measure the tire response in wet conditions in the laboratory. Tire specifications of different sizes and constructions have been recently tested under comparable conditions. The results of these tests are analyzed, making use of both physical and semi-empirical models. Moreover, the measurements are used to identify the parameters of the recently developed wet module extension of the MF-Tyre/MF-Swift model. This model is applied in vehicle dynamic simulations to study the effect of wet road tire behavior on vehicle dynamic performance.

The presentation will focus on:

  • Indoor testing of tires in wet conditions
  • The effect of water on the tire response
  • How different tire constructions can affect the response on wet roads
  • How the tire response on wet road affects the vehicle dynamics

Presentation #2: Flat-Trac testing with a realistic surface

📅 When: Day 3, Friday, March 6, 2025, at 14:10

Alex O’Neill will be leading a presentation on the compelling data of tire test methods, constructions, and recent refinements that make Asphaltant a long-term, repeatable, and realistic solution for tire and vehicle simulations.

As virtual engineering accelerates in the automotive industry, engineers generally have to decide between testing indoors on sandpaper, or outdoors on real asphalt. Both methods have distinct advantages and disadvantages. To utilize the advantages of indoor testing, GCAPS has been developing and refining an asphalt-like surface which can be mounted to the LTRe Flat-Trac: Asphaltant. The presentation will show data from various tire test methods and constructions plus recent improvements that make this technology a long-term solution that maximizes the repeatability that indoor testing doubtless brings, but on a truly representative surface – thereby enabling realistic tire and vehicle simulations.

The presentation will focus on:

  • Why sandpaper-based tire models can be unrealistic
  • How GCAPS has developed an indoor surface which is more realistic than sandpaper
  • How Asphaltant is manufactured
  • How tire models compare between sandpaper and Asphaltant
  • The upside to using more realistic tire models within vehicle simulations