Continental Drives Research on TRWP with the Help of a Supercomputer

Hanover, Germany, June 28, 2021. Continental, the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France have received a grant worth 43 million core hours of supercomputer time for their joint basic research project. The project, which aims to drive fundamental understanding of tire and road wear particles, has been in existence since 2014. Its goal is to learn more about the decomposition of rubber polymers to better understand the wear behavior of tires. The associated simulations of the behavior of complex polymer structures are very time-consuming. For this reason, the project partners applied for the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) initiative. With the digital computing power granted, they now have the opportunity to perform polymer simulations in greater depth and on a broader scale.

“With the help of the supercomputer, we can for the first time perform comprehensive simulations on molecular level. The results of this basic research will contribute to a more complete understanding of the formation of tire and road wear particles, and enable us to design the materials we use for tire construction even more sustainably in the future,” says Dr. Andreas Topp, Head of Materials, Process Development and Industrialization of the Tires business area at Continental.

Source: Continental