Design of Composite Brakes Using Knowledge-Based Design Methodology

Abstract

In designing modern friction materials that are normally made of composite materials, a more systematical approach is needed in order to select the most appropriate composition of raw materials for specific applications. Here, knowledge-based design methodology has been formulated for composite brake design application, that consists of: design database generation from experiments, metamodelling, and global optimization processes. The objective function has incorporated, among others, the uncertainties introduced in the experimentally-obtained design database, so that providing the optmization results with the information of variation. The application of the methodology has been demonstrated to two cases, i.e. train brake and motorcycle brake pad, with the optimization results close to the targetted values and the information of output variation, as intended.