The Effect of tyre pressure on vehicle performance

Abstract

In the world today, due to the high cost of running a vehicle, there had been many research to see ways of minimizing the cost of usage of vehicle. Some of these costs come from the tyre of the vehicle, amount of fuel needed to run the vehicle smoothly, buying spare parts of vehicles and ensuring safety of the vehicle. The study assessed the effects of vehicle tyre pressures and its influence on the fuel consumption. The study employed both qualitative and quantitative statistical procedures to characterized and analysed the data of GCAA. The study was carried out to find out whether these deviations in the tyre pressure of the vehicles have effect on fuel consumed by the sampled vehicles. Three (3) Toyota Coaster Buses and Two (2) Nissan Urvan minibuses sampled as 1’, 2’, 3’, 4’, and 5 were studied. Out of the 160 (100%) vehicles surveyed in the Kotoka International Airport, only 2.5% had the recommended tyre pressure, indicating that 97.5% of the vehicles surveyed deviated from the recommended standard tyre pressures. It was clear that there was direct influence of the vehicles tyre pressure on the fuel consumption. It indicated that when tyre pressure deviate from the recommended tyre pressure, there was an additional fuel consumption by the vehicle. Detailed the result of sample one (1) indicated that (10%) tyre pressure deviated above the recommended tyre pressure which gave an additional fuel loss of 2.72 litres during the travelled from Kumasi to Accra and returned millage of 540km/h. Again, 10.87 litres and 24.46 litres of additional fuel would be incurred for twenty percent (20%) and thirty percent (30%) tyre pressure deviation below the recommended standard tyre pressure influence travelled from Kumasi Airport to Accra (KIA) and returned for samples 2 and 3, respectively. The values of the distance travelled, fuel consumed and tyre pressure for all the samples of the vehicles were also characterized and analysed. Finally, it was clear that any deviation of vehicle tyre pressure had influenced on the usage of the vehicle economy (low-cost).