Experimental Investigation & Analysis Of Heat Transfer Characteristics In Automotive MMC Disc Brake Under Steady State And Dynamic Conditions

Abstract

During braking process, the kinetic energy of vehicle reduces and gets converted in thermal energy due to friction between disk and brake pads. The disk brake is used to retard the motion of vehicle by pressing brake pads against disk rotors. The frequent braking or panic braking results in overheating of brake disks which may result in brake fade. It is therefore essential to test newer materials which are more effective and possess better heat transfer characteristics than conventional cast iron material. The current research investigates the application of Al MMC material for ATV disk brake using experimental and numerical techniques. The numerical analysis is conducted on both conventional cast iron and Al MMC disk brake under steady state conditions and dynamic conditions. The dynamic condition testing involved testing of disk brake with externally flowing air at 2.5m/s and 5m/s using techniques of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The CAD model of ATV disk brake is developed in Creo design software and CFD analysis is conducted using ANSYS CFX. The turbulence model used for analysis is RNG k-epsilon. The temperature and heat flux are determined for disk brake under steady state and dynamic conditions. The results have shown that disk brake made from Al MMC possess better heat transfer characteristics as compared to conventional cast iron and cooling time also reduces with increase in external air speed.