A nondestructive tire-testing system has been developed using the pulse-echo ultrasonic technique, which offers substantial advantages over all other physical nondestructive-testing methods and shows promise of reducing the cost of production-tire inspection. Developed under the sponsorship of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration NHTSA (M.J. Lourenco, Program Director), the system was specifically designed to meet the requirements for detecting flaws in new tires. For this application, the reliable detection of possibly subtle flaws demands sophisticated techniques, but costs can be minimal because a high level of automation may be used. Work is underway to relate tire failure to anomalies observable by reflection ultrasonics. If satisfactory correlation can be demonstrated, the system may be used to screen larger samples of tires before testing for compliance with Motor Vehicle Standard 109. This report describes the ultrasonic techniques, explains the operation of the system and presents examples of data displays produced by the system test results from a small sample of tires.
During the period between November 1971 and june 1972, one hundred forty-four retread tires were nondestructively tested, run on a standard FMVSS 109 ...
An important problem in retreading tires is the assurance of a satisfactory casing. Since 1972 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has ...
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United States Department of Transportation
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