Dynamic Analysis of Disc Brake using Finite Element Method

Abstract

In today’s scenario, the necessity of efficient transportation system puts manufacturers in a situation, where they cannot neglect the importance of improvement in safety systems. The brake system is one of the most crucial parts of the safety system. In previous research works, they have performed finite element analysis of disc brake mostly on ICEM-CFD CFX, structural analysis with structural boundary conditions and thermal analysis with thermal boundary conditions. But they didn’t show how that frictional heat generated when disc brake is rotating. So to perform that analysis we have to couple both thermal and structural analyses. And on ANSYS workbench, it is not possible to couple both without the help of User Defined Functions (UDF).
In this thesis, we tried to find out the temperature with some varying boundary conditions by ANSYS simulation techniques. The simulations were performed by using thermostructural 3D coupled-field analysis in the transient structural module of ANSYS 15.0 workbench. The analyses formulation was based on Augmented Lagrangian method. In this research work, we tried to analyse the temperature heat generation along with simultaneous cooling in the transient structural module. The analyses are performed using temperaturedependent material models with grey cast iron, ceramic Al2O3, and structural steel. For this work, we have used element type SOLID226. We assume that percentage of frictional dissipated energy converted into heat is 100%.
These simulation results find out one temperature profile hot band in the middle of the disc brake rotor where the pad is in contact with the rotor, which shows maximum temperature generated on the disc surface. These analyses show that we can also perform transient thermal analysis on the transient structural module with the use of some User-Defined Functions (UDF).