Analysis of the Test Bench Design Influence on the Cooling Performance of a Rail Vehicle Brake Disc

Abstract

The presented article aims at assessment of the influence of test bench design on the cooling performance of a rail vehicle brake disc. The test bench is designed for experimental analyses of rail vehicles' brake components. The work includes an introduction to the solved problem, as well as a description of importance of airflow simulations in virtual environment. Creation of a geometrical model and its most important features are described. The research is performed by means of the computational fluid dynamics. For this method, it is important to set-up the boundary conditions, which are presented in the next part of the article. The results of the computational fluid dynamics simulations are presented for the solid disc and for the ventilated disc. The simulations of the solid disc showed the better convergence of calculations for various time-steps in comparison to the ventilated disc.

Keywords

• a rail vehicle disc brake
• computational fluid dynamics
• simulation of cooling
• a solid disc
• a ventilated disc