INTRODUCTION

The increased refinement of passenger vehicles has caused the expectations of the
consumer to rise. This has put considerable pressure on the automotive industry to
produce ever quieter cars, none more so than in the area of brake refinement. In
order to prevent the occurrence of judder as well as many other forms of brake
noise, excessive heating of the brake disc must be avoided, whilst minimizing
temperature variations across the rotor. This is in direct contradiction with the
additional demands placed on the braking system by the increasing vehicle weight
and engine performance. This is especially prevalent within the luxury grand
touring market; where the highest levels of performance and refinement are
expected by the customer.
It is clear that to increase a brake rotors resistance to producing noise and fade, it
must be designed such that it ensures sufficient uniform heat dissipation and
thermal capacity. In this project the airflow through and convective heat dissipation
from the front brake discs of a high performance All Terrain Vehicle (ATV) has
been investigated using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code.

PHYSICS OF THE PROBLEM

When brakes are applied, heat is absorbed by the rotor. Rotor dissipates this heat to
air by convection heat transfer mode. For precise determination of temperature,
exact value of heat transfer coefficient ( h ) should be calculated. This value
depends on braking system, vehicle speed, rotor speed and thermal properties of
rotor material. Exact calculation of h is tedious. So for determination of its
exact value CFD analysis of rotor is required. CFD analysis was carried in ANSYS

Fluent. For CFD analysis air domain is created around the rotor. And rotor is sliced
from air domain. Model is then meshed by adding inflation layer to air domain and
some surface to disc surfaces. Meshing should be refined to get skewness factor
below 0.98. Otherwise there will be error in converging the solution. All other air
properties and material properties are updated. Analysis is done considering air
with velocity equal to vehicle velocity and energy input to rotor in terms of heat
flux. Inlet of air is velocity inlet with 16.67 m/s velocity. And outlet of air domain
is pressure outlet at atmospheric pressure. After verification of model and
boundary conditions, run the calculations. Iterations should be performed till the
solutions converge. Various contours for surface heat flux, temperature distribution
and heat transfer coefficients can be obtained.

GOVERNING DIFFERENTIAL EQUATION

CFD solves Navier-stokes equations along with the continuity equations and
appropriate auxiliary equations depending on the type of applications using a
control volume formulation. In the present case the conservation equations for
mass, momentum and energy have been solved with two additional flow transport
equations for steady turbulent flow. The equation for conservation of mass given
below is valid for both incompressible and compressible flows. The source term
Sm is the mass added to the continuous phase from the dispersed second phase
(e.g. Due to vaporization of liquid droplets) and any user defined sources.

Conservation of momentum in the ith direction in an inertial (non accelerating)

reference frame is given as

The stress tensor is given by

Where is the molecular viscosity, I is the unit tensor, and the second term on the
right hand side is the effect of volume dilation.
To model the flow of energy fluent employs the equation for energy which is given
in the vector form by

keff is the effective conductivity (k +kt, where kt is the turbulent thermal

conductivity, defined according to the turbulence model being used), and Ji is the
diffusion flux of species j. The first three terms on the right-hand side of the
equation represent energy transfer due to conduction, species diffusion, and
viscous dissipation, respectively. Sh includes the heat of chemical reaction.
To enable the modeling of a rotating body (in this case the disc) the rotating
reference frame technique is employed. This technique utilizes modified versions
of the momentum and conservation equations. In terms of absolute velocities the
left hand side of the momentum equations becomes

V is defined as relative velocity and is the angular velocity vector. The continuity
equation employed in rotating reference frame problems is written as:

The test data relating to disc temperature, ambient temperature and vehicle speed
was used to provide vital information for the generation of accurate boundary
conditions such as rotor surface temperature as well as speed of rotation.

FIELD VARIABLE

Usually an FE modeling system is implemented specifically for a well-defined

physical field, such as a seepage problem or a deformation problem, where the
physical background of the modeling concept and the corresponding field variables
are clearly related and simple. They may be combined together to form so-called
element formulas. The Degree of Freedom (DOF) class, for example, may
naturally refer to the primary field variables of the underlying physical field, such
as nodal displacements, without any ambiguity. The secondary field variables (e.g.
stresses or strains), which are normally locally computable through interpolation of
primary field variables, may be defined on demand and computed using the values
of DOF without the need of further interpreting their type.
In the current analysis the degrees of freedom is one as the disc will rotate in the
direction of wheel only and the secondary field variables are temperature
distribution are convective heat transfer coefficient.

ELEMENT FOR ANALYSIS

In the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in ANSYS a model of disc along with
the boundaries is created. The element under analysis i.e. a Brake Disc of material
EN9 is as shown in figure.1

Figure.1
The outer diameter and the disc thickness of the disc is considered with reference
to the standard disc which are used the 2-wheeler vehicles. The disc we are going
to analyse have following dimensions:
Outer Diameter :
200mm

Pitch Circle Diameter : 90mm

Disc Thickness :
4mm

BOUNDARY CONDITIONS
For the computational analysis we need to create a boundary domain for the disc
with which a sufficient environment is created which affects the disc conditions.
By trial and error method it is observed that the domain six times in length and
eight times in width that of the disc diameter and ten times the thickness affects the
condition of disc. This implies that the the domain will be of dimension
1200mm*800mm*40mm.
The velocity of the air is nothing but the velocity of the disc and the velocity of
disc is the velocity of vehicle. In ATVs maximum velocity is upto 60km/hr i.e
16.67m/s. So the inlet velocity of the air is 16.67m/s and the outlet of air domain is
pressure outlet at atmospheric pressure.

EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS
An essential part of any computational analysis is validation against a data set
which is both
repeatable and accurate. Within the field of automotive braking there are two main
sources of data for validation; the brake dynamometer and vehicle testing. The
brake dynamometer does not offer a true picture of the aerodynamic performance
of the brake rotor due to the vast differences in the surrounding geometry of the
disc which is known to have a large effect on disc performance. Therefore it is
necessary to perform vehicle testing in order to quantify the differences between
dynamometer testing, computational analysis and real world application.
The vehicle test procedure was devised to replicate the power inputs of a
manufacturers standard judder performance test within the restraints of testing in
the UK. The test consists of 19 high speed low deceleration braking events to
condition the brakes for judder. High speed stops are used in order to quickly
dissipate a large amount of heat energy into the brake system therefore giving the
potential for large thermal gradients within the rotor. This large input of energy into
the brake rotor provides the ideal conditions for the thermo-elastic deformations

that can lead to the occurrence of judder. Low deceleration rates of 0.2-0.4g are
utilised in order to prevent pressure from the braking system ironing out
deformations in the rotor and maximising the chances of the vehicle occupants to
experience the symptoms of judder.
The vehicle testing equipment included:
Embedded thermocouples positioned half across the face of both the inner
and outer rubbing surfaces of the front brake rotors, connected via slip rings
provided an accurate measurement of the disc surface temperatures.
A rubbing thermocouple mounted on the left hand rear brake rotor provided
a reference temperature.
Two axis accelerometers mounted on the brake caliper and inner brake pad
back plate provided information on the tangential and axial vibrations.
High frequency pressure transducers to measure fluctuations in the brake
fluid pressure, allowing fluctuations caused by disc thickness variations to
be analyzed.
Vehicle speed was provided via a GPS system.
Vehicle deceleration was measured with an accelerometer fitted within the
cabin.
Pedal effect and travel were measured with load and displacement
transducers.
A modular data logging system capable of recording the 19 channels of data
required in real-time.
A laptop to enable real-time viewing of brake temperature, vehicle speed
and vehicle deceleration.
This increased the repeatability of the test procedure and reduced the level of
experimental error.