CFD and Design Analysis of Brake Disc

Abstract

The ever increasing need of effective transportations puts automobile manufacturers in a non-avoidable situation of maintaining and improvement of safety systems. The brake system has always been one of the most critical active safety systems. Brake cooling is further an important aspect to consider for brake disc durability and performance. The importance of convective cooling of a brake disc is an important factor since it can be significantly improved by trivial design changes and contributes to the major part of the total dissipated heat flux for normal driving conditions. At first, experimental aero-thermal flow test of ventilated brake discs were performed in the Volvo brake machine and the Volvo wind tunnel. These tests were further correlated with a CFD modelling method in order to provide reliability and trust to the model itself. The developed CFD model was then applied into a full vehicle model of a mid-size Volvo to predict and analyse the aero-thermal flow behaviour of a ventilated brake disc in the wheel house. It can be seen that the vanes contributes to the major dissipated convective heat from the brake disc and the wheel house through-flow is of great importance for the cooling behaviour. Because of the complexity of the wheel house flow, trivial design changes could alteration the aero-thermal flow behaviour of the brake disc. An even more comprehensive study could be obtained by applying a full thermal which predicts the aero-thermal flow dependency of convection, conduction and radiation.