• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.18 no.10
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• pp.817-822
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• 2017

The braking system is one of the most important components in vehicles and machines. It must exert a reliable braking force when they are brought to a halt. Generally, frictional heat is generated by converting kinetic energy into heat energy through friction. As the kinetic energy is converted into heat energy, high temperature heat is generated which affects the mechanical behavior of the braking system. Frictional heat affects the thermal expansion and friction coefficient of the brake system. If the temperature is not controlled, the brake performance will be decreased. Therefore, it is important to predict and control the heat generation of the brake. Various numerical analysis studies have been carried out to predict the frictional heat, but they assumed the existence of boundary conditions in the numerical analysis to simulate the frictional heat, because the simulation of frictional heat is difficult and time consuming. The results were based on the assumption that the frictional heat is different from the actual temperature distribution in a rotating brake system. Therefore, the reliability of the cooling effect or thermal stress using the results of these studies is insufficient. In order to overcome these limitations and establish a simulation procedure to predict the frictional heat, this study directly simulates the frictional heat generation by using a thermal-structure coupling element. In this study, we analyzed the thermo-mechanical behavior of a brake model, in order to investigate the thermal characteristics of brake systems by using the Finite Element method (FEM). This study suggests the necessity to directly simulate the frictional heating and it is hoped that it can provide the necessary information for simulations.