THERMOMECHANICAL STRESS ANALYSIS OF VEHICLES GRAY CAST BRAKE

Abstract

The vehicle braking system is considered to be one of the most fundamental safety-critical systems in modern vehicles, as its main purpose is to stop or decelerate the vehicle. The frictional heat generated during braking application can cause numerous negative effects on the brake assembly, such as brake fade, premature wear, thermal cracks and disc thickness variation. In the past, surface roughness and wear at the pad interface have rarely been considered in studies of the thermal analysis of a disc brake assembly using the finite element method. The ventilated pad-disc brake assembly is built by a three-dimensional model with a thermomechanical coupling boundary condition and multi-body model technique. The numerical simulation for the coupled transient thermal field and stress field is carried out sequentially with the thermal-structural coupled method, based on ANSYS software, to evaluate the stress fields of deformations that are established in the disc with the pressure of the pads and in the conditions of tightening of the disc; thus, the contact pressure distributions field in the pads is obtained, which is another significant aspect in this research. The results obtained by the simulation are satisfactorily compared with those of the specialized literature.