Bridgestone enhances virtual tyre development capabilities

Bridgestone has enhanced its Virtual Tyre Development (VTD) capabilities with the addition of a new driver-in-the-loop (DiL) simulator at its EMEA R&D Centre based near Rome, Italy.

The investment will enable Bridgestone to combine tyre and vehicle simulations with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies – boosting innovation, sustainability and cutting time to market.

Having leveraged VTD for a decade, the introduction of a Bridgestone-owned DiL simulator means its engineers can virtually reproduce tyre behaviour, vehicle interaction and response in various conditions – combined with subjective input from expert test drivers.

With the help of AI technologies, this combination supports faster assessment of many more design options, accelerating progress toward target tyre performance and the virtual experimentation of new and innovative design concepts.

Bridgestone says the new DiL simulator will help boost innovation and explore uncharted areas, while increasing speed to market and the efficiency of the development processes.

The investment also strengthens the company’s development of premium Original Equipment (OE) and replacement products, and its collaboration with Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) partners. This is thanks to these new capabilities enabling tyres and vehicles to be developed in parallel through fast joint iterations.

On-premises DiL simulation will also help accelerate the company’s sustainability journey. By reducing the volume of both manufactured tyres and physical tyre testing, Bridgestone projects that up to 12,000 experimental tyres will be saved every year thanks to this investment, providing a significant consequent reduction in CO2 emissions.

The business’s proprietary VTD technology already leads to a reduction of up to 60 per cent in raw material consumption and CO2 emissions in the development phase of OE tyres. For replacement tyres, the saving is at least 25 per cent.

“This investment in our internal DiL simulation capabilities is a major milestone as we build a comprehensive ecosystem for accurately predicting tyre performance in the virtual world. It also gives us the capabilities to experiment with new and innovative combinations of designs and materials in a fully virtual environment,” said Emilio Tiberio, chief technology officer Bridgestone West.