(Correspondents: Tong Chen, Li Hongwei) On May 5, 2016, China National Tyre Quality Supervision and Inspection Center (CTQI) and Idiada of Spain signed an agreement in Beijing Research and Design Institute of Rubber Industry concerning the cooperation on a outdoor tyre test project. Ma Liangqing, Executive Vice President of the Institute and Director of CTQI, and Josep Maria Farran, signed the agreement on behalf of the two sides and the project was formally launched.
In recent years, the automobile industry has seen rapid development and posed higher requirements for tyres. Besides quality and safety, tyres are also required to provide more comfort, make less rolling noise, less resistance, and cope better with wet and slippery road surfaces. Many properties of a tyre, including its speed, noise, endurance, performance on wet and slippery road surface, controllability, passenger comfort, as well as the mechanics, safety, energy-saving features, and environmental friendliness of a tyre, can only be verified on a test field. Tests and test data are technical and commercial secrets of relevant enterprises and many top-notch tyre manufacturers in the world have their own test fields. However, China is in lack of such fields and progress in this regard is urgently needed.
In 2009, two important tyre-related regulations were adopted in the European Union, EC 661/2009 and EC 1222/2009, stipulating the minimum rolling resistance, noise and wet road grip of tyres. These became bars for entry into the EU market. According to the regulations all passenger vehicles, vans, trucks, and buses manufactured in July 2012 and later and sold in EU countries since November 2012 must be classified and labeled by fuel efficiency wet road grip, and noise performance. Yet data of noise and wet road grip can only be obtained on a tyre test field. We have standards in place for a tyre’s rolling resistance in China, and work on a wet road grip standard is in progress. Relevant labeling regulations will be introduced gradually, facilitating the transformation and upgrade of Chinese tyres.
A tyre test field is an important tool for the application of new technologies and the development of new tyre products. It is also a benchmark of the capacity of a country’s tyre industry to produce and development tyres. Therefore, it is both beneficial and necessary for China to build a world-leading tyre test field of its own. Without it, it will difficult for China to build a powerful tyre industry. The lack of test facilities is now a major bottleneck for independent innovations in the Chinese tyre industry and consequently, Chinese tyre cannot be used as original car tyre, but only substitutions. In the past years, as a leading force in tyre testing in China, CTQI has been seeking the opportunity to build a fully-equipped outdoor test field but it is difficult because of the large land area and high cost it requires. After this test field in finished, CTQI will become the first national institution of China to have the capacity of testing raw materials, semi-manufactured goods, and completed products both indoors and outdoors, covering the whole manufacturing process. Thus, it will be able to provide specialized and reliable test service for independent innovation in the Chinese tyre industry and contribute to China’s march toward a power in the tyre industry.
CTQI, affiliated to Beijing Research and Design Institute for Rubber Industry, was founded in 1987 as the Tyre Surveillance Center of the Ministry of Chemical Industry. It is the first and largest national tyre lab of China, with the most inclusive technical capabilities. It is recognized by AQSIQ for the test and experiment of defect automobile products, an ized certification and test institution for national science and technology achievements, a certification institute for accident-causing tyre products, and a member of the national technical committee for tyre and rim standards. It is also a certified test institution of the Certification and Accreditation Administration for the compulsory CCC certification.