Kumho Tire's U.S. tech center hub of innovation

FAIRLAWN, Ohio — In a city with rubber roots, it's easy to take tires for granted.

Akron, after all, earned the Rubber Capital of the World moniker for a good reason. Today, the city once dotted with tire factories bearing big name logos doesn't have the manufacturing presence it once did. But rubber — and the tires, specifically — never really left.

The greater Akron area remains a hub of engineering, design and development. And for Kumho Tire USA Inc. in particular, it's the heartbeat of the North American tire market. Because in the city of Fairlawn — just about 20 minutes from the heart of downtown Akron—is the Kumho America Technical Center.

Kumho opened the Fairlawn facility in the early 2000s and, according to KATC Managing Director Rick Cunat, the tire maker continues to invest in the facility, both with equipment upgrades and renovations. It's proof, he said, that the Akron area remains a critical part of the tire industry and that Kumho remains invested in North America.

The tires that Kumho rolls into the North American market start right there with Mr. Cunat and his team. They're engineered just outside of Akron and then manufactured right outside of Atlanta at Kumho's Macon, Ga., plant.

Each tire coming out of Georgia is designed especially for North American roadways and the drivers who use it — think low noise, long tread life and all-weather performance.

"There's a perception that a tire is this black piece of rubber, when it is a complex-composite, highly engineered product," KATC Engineering Manager Clint Covey said. "If you really think about it in terms of vehicle performance, the tire is the only piece of your car touching the road. So all of the force and all of the performance has to be translated through the tire. … It's a big deal to get it right."

And get it right tire makers do. Again and again.

They get it right so many times that the products they design often are taken for granted. Most often, when drivers need tires to grip the road surface, handle a curve or a sudden stop—the tires do just that. So drivers don't have to think about the dozens of engineers, scientists, architects and specialists behind each tire.

"We take (our jobs) very seriously," Roger Dailey, KATC's manager of compounding and materials, who brings more than 43 years of experience to the job, said. "We want our tires to be safe (because) our kids ride on them, we ride on them, our grandkids ride on them. … They don't think about (their tires) because everyone in here has done their jobs."

The finer details
When it comes to tire development, the smallest details matter. Infinitesimal changes to the design's tread or width can change a tire entirely. It is Mr. Covey who is focused on taking enormous amounts of data and piecing it together to help pinpoint how the subtlest of changes can perfect a tire design.

Using tire modeling and simulation software, Mr. Covey can analyze every detail of the tire, helping to optimize the design and expedite the manufacturing process.

"Time to market is very important," Mr. Covey said. "And it's not only the time to market. It is also doing all of the engineering functions that we need to do—like all of the virtual modeling. So it is finding an efficient way to do all of that additional work, do it faster and also get the product out in a shorter amount of time."

To do that, Mr. Covey has a number of analytical and modeling tools at his disposal.

What he needs is data. And every day, Kumho has more of it — both from real world applications and testing. As the KATC team continues to bring new products to market, its understanding of what works — and to what extent — expands, adding layers to the analysis Mr. Covey runs.

Combine the expanded data with more computing power and improved software, and Mr. Covey's models become even more precise.

Testing big ideas

Away from Mr. Covey's quiet office is Gary Bradnick's workspace — a full laboratory of whirring machinery and moving equipment. This is the place where the KATC team's biggest ideas are put to the test.

By nature, big ideas don't test quietly, so every day Bradnick, KATC's lead lab technologist, is surrounded by the soft whirring, clicking and popping of the equipment in the space. Most days it's background noise, but other days it can be a bit louder.

"Over here is where we mix batches," Mr. Bradnick said. "We don't have anything to mix today. Plus, if we were mixing, we wouldn't be able to hear each other."

Like Mr. Covey, Mr. Bradnick is tasked with ensuring that the tires designed and developed by the team do exactly what they are supposed to do. And the way the Kumho team sees it, its developments are in good hands. Mr. Bradnick brings more than 45 years of rubber industry experience to his position — he started out in the custom mixing space before joining Kumho in 2001 — and his sense of humor helps to make daunting challenges seem surmountable.

Armed with a range of equipment, both traditional and modern, Mr. Bradnick conducts a variety of tests from viscosity and tensile testing to compound analysis. His goal is to help build a more accurate vision of how a tire would perform on the roadways by better identifying characteristics such as grip, braking and rolling resistance.

"On one end of the spectrum is, like, a super ball," Mr. Bradnick said. "It has great rolling resistance, but the braking would be terrible."

Ensuring that tires perform optimally is tricky, particularly as the demands of electric vehicles change the game and redefine exactly what tires can and should be doing.

EVs simply demand more from tires. They have much higher torque, which changes the requirements for grip. And, given the weight of EVs, tires need to be much more robust, able to carry the loads of the heavy battery packs.

Sprinkle in expectations for more sustainable materials and end products, and you're facing a tough challenge.

"What a lot of people don't understand is that the grip that the tire has and the wear—and then we want rolling resistance now to be environmentally friendly and use less energy—they are diametrically opposed," Mr. Dailey said. "We are literally trying to bend the rules of Mother Nature a little bit."

Joe Lanzarotta is a senior compound engineer who works closely with Mr. Dailey, and has since the duo designed tires together at General Tire decades ago. And with more than 40 years of experience, Mr. Lanzarotta has seen the industry transition. Today, he said, tire makers again are searching for that next big breakthrough, the 21st century equivalent of silica.

"Silica was huge," Mr. Lanzarotta said. "Silica really took tires to the next level, now it's really a challenge of what's next? What can we find that will make the next quantum leap?"

In the materials realm, a number of new and promising options are beginning to emerge, particularly with renewable and sustainable resource options. But the industry still is learning how those new materials will change the tire's makeup and performance.

"We have 100-150 years of tread patterns, so a lot of them are beginning to look quite similar," Mr. Lanzarotta said. "It's what is being put into those tires that is really changing."

The right recipe
But it's more than just what you bake into the tire compound that matters. How you make that tire, matters, too. And those subtle differences in compounding and manufacturing are what set tire makers apart, according to Dailey.

"You take the same materials—because it's like everybody in the tire industry has it available, right? So, the question is: How do you put those together? What method do you use?" Dailey said. "I equate it to my grandmother's chicken dumplings vs. my mother's. I love my grandmother's, but how she does it a certain way, seems to be better than mom's, but they are both good.

"So it's the method and the material selection, when you add those things together, how you do it and the equipment you use in the manufacturing process—all of that has an impact on tire performance."

And this is where Bradnick comes in. He leads the charge in helping to perfect the best tire recipe. At times, that's something easier said than done, he noted, reiterating Dailey's point that intricacies in mixing and manufacturing can change a product.

He pointed to a range of rubber samples he has on hand to help prove his point. Each sample, simple rectangular rubber mats marked to designate their testing order, look almost exactly alike. But their feel—their properties—are quite different.

"These are all the same recipes — same ingredients — just different mixing temperatures, parameters (or) order of addition to see if we could get the dispersion of the silica really dialed in" Bradnick said. "So it's not just about ingredients. You have functional polymer, you have silane, you have silica, and they all work together."

Sometimes, when it comes to the material compounds, the best ideas and hunches work exactly as planned, paving the way for a better tire. Other times, the materials don't blend quite as you hope.

But that's all part of the experience, according to Bradnick.

"We make our share of batches that come out of (the mixer) as powder," Bradnick said with a smile. "We have a Shop-Vac just for that."

"I've had that happen a few times," Dailey added with a laugh. "I gave him a batch one time and told him, 'Hey, this is going to work great!' Later, he came out to my desk and goes, 'man your broom.' "

No bad days
Tire compounds are just part of the equation. The tread design matters, too.

Finite element analysis helps to refine many of these designs and saves a lot of time and money on the prototyping end. But the only way to truly see how a new tire manages roadways is by taking it to the pavement.

Before the KATC does that, it turns to Don Heath, the tech center's resident tire carver. Using a printed overlay of the tread design as a guide, Mr. Heath carefully makes each tread cut by hand, using his specialized tooling. It's a time-intensive task that requires both precision and patience.

And Mr. Heath has it down to a science. He's been carving tread patterns into tires for more than 40 years, having honed the craft as a General Tire employee before joining the Kumho team.

With that kind of experience, he said, you can bet each cut is accurate.

"I don't have bad days," Mr. Heath said, before jokingly adding, "only when the Browns lose. Those are bad Mondays."

"Yeah, we just don't carve anything from October to January," NVH Manager Ken Albers replied with a smile.

Jokes aside, Heath's work is incredibly accurate — and incredibly valuable. In a matter of weeks, he can add a tread pattern to a set of test tires, and that's a big savings for the company, which doesn't have to build expensive molds for a design that may not work.

"You can do a set of these in about 10 working days," Mr. Heath said. "In a month, month and a half, you can get four sets done instead of the cost of a mold. And, if all else fails, you can go back to start over again if these don't work out."

Pitch perfect
For tires to work exactly right, they have to meet all our senses. They have to feel right, handle right, perform optimally when most needed — and in any road condition.

They also have to sound just right. As an NVH specialist with OEM experience, Mr. Albers is tasked with ensuring they do. It's a job that is becoming even more critical with the rise of EVs.

"Noise is very important with electric vehicles because you don't have a combustion engine that masks a lot of the other noise inside the vehicle,"Mr. Albers said. "So it is very critical to get noise down to a level where you don't really notice it."

And it's in the soundproof workspace of the Akron-area facility that Mr. Albers works to find that perfect sound.

Often, that means going through recordings of tires rolling along road surfaces of varying kinds, pinpointing sounds and determining how to refine the noise to something more suitable for the driver and the specific vehicle, in the case of OE fitments.

Mr. Albers settles in behind the laptop and with a few mouse clicks pulls the visuals of an audio recording onto the screen. He presses play, unlocks the audio file and the oversized cursor on the screen scrolls left to right over the unique, jagged audio rendering as a low, steady hum fills the room.

"We will record the vehicle going over different surfaces and will compare it to a competitor tire," Mr. Albers said, talking over the audio. "Or we'll have two or three different variants, and we are comparing them for ride handling and we are comparing them for noise. So we will have objective data, we have different frequencies that we are concerned about. For instance, you may be concerned about the high frequency, so we can filter out the low frequency."

The hum of the audio file continues—a comforting white noise that sounds like a steady wind—as he explains how the software and the data gleaned from it can perfect a tire design.

"Maybe, we just want to focus in on another area here, so we can filter out different frequencies," he said, clicking the mouse a few times. The sounds on the recording noticeably change as he continues, "maybe there is a certain tone or frequency that is more objectionable, so we may go back and redesign the tire to address any of those deficiencies that we identified."

With all the data he's able to produce, Mr. Covey's FEA modeling systems can help to make exactly the kind of adjustments a tire may need.

Global advantage
While the KATC is leading Kumho's charge for tire development in North America, the Akron facility isn't isolated. It's connected to each of the company's global R&D Centers—in South Korea, Germany and China. This offers a number of advantages, the KATC team said, including expertise in a variety of areas.

Each region of the world has different expectations for their tires. For instance, drivers in Europe expect optimal wet grip over wear performance, while the overall longevity and performance of the tire in all weather conditions tend to define expectations in North America.

"We used to do a lot of support work for Europe, and that is a classic example in my mind," said Mark Panning, a principal engineer with four decades of tire industry experience. "Here, in the U.S., a lot of the requirements are around longevity: long wear and treadwear warranties — 60,000 miles, 70,000 miles. … In Europe, it traditionally has been much different, with a much higher emphasis on wet grip and a much lower emphasis on wear. We used to say if we could get 20,000 miles on a set of tires over there, people were happy over there. But it had to have outstanding levels of wet grip.

"So a tire designed for the North American market would not be necessarily well-accepted in Europe," Panning said. "We had to design tires that had certain levels of commonality for one level of manufacturing, but it also had customizations for the local market. Europe was probably the most divergent from the U.S."

In South Korea, "they seem to be more interested in a very plush ride and a very quiet tire, as Mark (Panning) would say," said Ed Cercek, a principal engineer with KATC and another of the team's General Tire alumni. "Here (in the U.S.), I think we have to have a much more balanced tire. We have to target the wet, we have to target the winter, and we have to target the treadwear.

"That is a challenge in itself," Mr. Cercek added. "When you design for one thing, you are usually taking away from the other. We have to find ways around that, and that is what makes things very exciting and very challenging."

But when you have an entire world of experts to help you take on those challenges, Mr. Cunat said, they certainly feel less daunting. Especially when it comes to designing the next-generation tires for the next-generation of vehicles, that global expertise is priceless.

"(In Asia) they are experts in NVH, so we are learning from them, especially now that we need to go there with the EVs. I mean, Kumho is at a very good (place)—our NVH is generally very good coming out of the box because of that reason," Cunat said.

"We have the experience here with the wear and the traction that we share over there," he added. "When we go through and tire engineers share construction iterations that change the performance (of a tire), it is well-accepted on both sides."

Not only does this cooperation ensure that the Kumho team can roll out the best possible tires, it expedites the development process — because development doesn't end when the Akron team heads home for the evening. The work it does each day is passed on to other tech centers, which pick it up when they come into the office. So as one tech center is turning off the lights on a project for the day, another is turning its own lights on.

"On certain programs where we are collaborating together, technology—the speed of emails and everything—makes that part fairly easy," Mr. Cercek said. "It's almost like we can have a 24-hour consistent development on a certain program."

And the Fairlawn technical center is a critical part of that process. It's also why its connection to the Rubber City remains an important one, Mr. Cunat said.

"We are going to be here for a while," Mr. Cunat said.