Commercial Vehicle Safety Technologies: Applications for Tire Pressure Monitoring and Management.

Tire deficiencies often cause commercial motor vehicles (CMVs) to be cited for regulatory violations and to be taken out-of-service during roadsideinspections. As part of a major safety technology project to assess the state of the practice and potential contributions of advanced sensor systems, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) sponsored threestudies between 2003 and 2008 on tire pressure management systems (TPMS).The first study focused on obtaining baseline information. Fleet records and limited field collections were used to develop a database of inflationreadings for 35,000 CMV tires, providing the first large-scale source of information on CMV tire inflation in the United States. The second study assessed the performance of TPMS in a controlled test-track environment. Multiple systems were installed on a truck tractor, a trailer, and a motorcoach. These were run under nominal operating conditions and with tire and system faults deliberately introduced. Although all the systems functioned at the levels specified by their manufacturers, some had limited ability to compensate for changes in ambient temperature, to reset pressure "alert"thresholds, and to withstand repeated tire installation and removal cycles. The third study, performed in an operational setting in an urban transit fleet, assessed the performance and maintainability of tire pressure monitoring devices. Three types of TPMS were installed on 12 buses that accumulated more than 1.28 million km, in aggregate, during the 12-month test period. The results of this study pointed to sensor durability and data integration challenges that need to be overcome for these systems to be used successfully in a severe service environment. These studies provided new information directly comparing the performance of TPMS in controlled and operational settings. Results are limited to the particular systems and applications tested. Study data are available from the FMCSA. The full text ofthis paper may be found at: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv21/09-0134.pdf For the covering abstract see ITRD E145407.