Numerical and Experimental Investigations of Brake Cooling for Passenger Cars

Journal article, 2015

Automotive brakes are used to the convert kinetic energy of a vehicle into thermal energy and then dissipate it into the environment. There are a number of different tests designed to ensure reliable performance of the brake system under different conditions. In this paper, a CAD model of a passenger vehicle was used in computer simulations of a brake system cooling-down process. Since the simulations modelled not only convection, but also conduction and radiation, the vehicle model was created with a high level of detail fully resolving the geometry of brake system parts. In addition to the simulations, an experimental study was conducted in a full-scale wind tunnel. For this study the vehicle was equipped with 140 thermocouples measuring temperatures of the different components affected. The experimental data was used for setting the initial temperature values in the simulations. Having access to data from both numerical and experimental investigations allows a more detailed picture of the process, and in this paper some of the results as well as the problems and limitations of different methods are presented and discussed.