Thermomechanical Simulation of Wear and Hot Bands in a Disc Brake by Adopting an Eulerian Approach

Abstract: In this paper frictional heating of a disc brake is simulated while taking wear into account. By performing thermomechanical finite element analysis, it is studied how the wear history will influence the development of hot bands. The frictional heat analysis is based on an Eulerian formulation of the disc, which requires significantly lower computational time as compared to a standard Lagrangian approach. A real disc-pad system to a heavy truck is considered, where complete three-dimensional geometries of the ventilated disc and pad are used in the simulations. A sequential approach is adopted, where the contact forces are computed at each time step taking the wear and thermal deformations of the mating parts into account. After each brake cycle, the wear profile of the pad is updated and used in subsequent analysis. The results show that when wear is considered, different distributions of the temperature on disc are obtained for each new brake cycle. After a few braking cycles two hot bands appear on the disc surface instead of only one. These results are in agreement with experimental observations.