## 1 Introduction  
The development of aircraft with high performance characteristics has placed increased demands on landing gear and tire components. Aircraft tires have developed through the years to a point where the ratio of tire weight to aircraft weight has progressively decreased, due in part to improved tire cord materials, rubber compounds, and tire structural design. During landing and extreme cornering phases, aircraft tires are subjected to different mechanical and thermal cyclic loading scenarios. Thus, the tire undergoes significant vertical and lateral forces, internal and external thermal heating, generating severe wear. This last leads to loss of grip and efficiency which are critical for aircraft security. Thus, a need exists for the development of methods for predicting the strength limit, the thermal evolution of aircraft tires on some rational basis other than indoor testing. The thermal evolution of aircraft tire is related to the friction and the energy loss (hysteresis) phenomena produced during landing and skidding situations. Heating is generated within the tire structure and affects its service life. The estimation of the heat build-up is essential for evaluating the durability of the tire. Aircraft tires generate significant temperatures during landing and taxi-driving. The temperatures are high enough to critically damage the strength of the load-carrying fabric components in the tire. Excessive temperatures can easily cause the failure of the tire even if the stress levels are not excessively high [1]. In addition to the interaction between temperature and stress, complex phenomena are at work in the repeated daily use of aircraft tires. These phenomena are basically related to the long-term strength degradation and grip loss of an aircraft tire due to cyclic variations in stress and temperature. Indeed, all information available for tire life expectancy are based mostly on experimental studies and suffer from speed and loading limitations. In the literature, many researches are dedicated to the thermal prediction of passenger vehicle tires. Several numerical approaches were developed. [PERSON] et al. [2] have carried out a thermo-mechanical analysis for an approximated two-dimensional tire structure. This approach leads to a pseudo steady-state temperature profile for a rolling tire. [PERSON] et al. [3] have proposed a coupled thermo-mechanical method, in which the stiffness and the loss of properties are functions of the strain, temperature and loading frequency. Results for rolling resistance and steady state temperature distribution are compared with experiments for passenger vehicle and radial medium truck tires. [PERSON] et al. [4] developed a nonlinear Finite Element model of a radial-ply truck tire rolling on a drum by using explicit FEA simulation software. The tire model was constructed to its extreme complexity with solid, layered membranes, and beam elements. In addition to the tire model, a rim model was included and rotated with the tire with its proper mass and rotational inertial effects. The predicted tire characteristics and responses, such as vertical stiffness, cornering force, and aligning moment, correlated to physical measurements. In this study, the in-plane sidewall translational stiffness and damping constants of the FEA tire model were determined by rotating the tire on a cleat-drum. The other in-plane parameters, such as tire rotational stiffness and damping constant, were determined by applying and releasing a tangential force on the tread band of the FEA tire model. The thermal evolution of tires has a significant influence on tire behavior. Therefore it is crucial to assess the tire temperature during testing, in order to integrate the temperature effects in the numerical simulations. As it was mentioned, there is a direct relationship between tire temperature and the energy loss in the tire. Temperature of the rubber in the tire's tread can be measured using different methods ranging from simple sensor (internal or external) to high speed infrared camera [5].