Effect of Frictional Material on Thermal Behavior of Brake System

Abstract

The brake system is one of the most important systems in all vehicles. The main objective of this system is to control the vehicle mechanical movement and stopping. Where, it can’t drive safely any vehicle without the brake system to control its acceleration rate and its stability. The effective factors that affected the brake performance are the properties of frictional material of pads and disc. The objective of the present work is to study the thermal behavior of the brake system using different types of frictional material for pads and find the optimal one of them. High amount of heat will be generated between the disc and pads during the braking process; may cause quick failure in future. In the present paper, a 3-dimensional thermal transient model of the brake system has been developed using finite element technique (COMSOL Multiphysics® 5.5). Five types of friction materials (St37-2, HCC, G95, LUK, and Tiger) are used in the numerical analyses. The results presented the variation and distribution of contact temperatures of the proposed frictional materials during braking period. The main conclusion based on the obtained results is that the optimal frictional material is HCC material and the poorest one is LUK material.

Keywords

• brake system
• frictional materials
• thermal behavior
• finite element analysis