Structural and Thermal Analysis of Brake Drum

Abstract

The brake drum is a specialized brake that uses the concept of friction to decelerate or to stop the vehicle. The deceleration is achieved by the assistance of the friction generated by a set of brake shoes or pads. During the brake operation heat is ejected out this causes damage to the brake. Disc (Rotor) brakes are exposed to large thermal stresses during routine braking and extraordinary thermal stresses during hard braking. To satisfy this condition the drum material should possess a high thermal conductivity, thermal capacity and high strength .The common material used for construction of brake drum is cast iron. The aim of the project is to design, model a disc. Modeling is done using catia. Structural and Thermal analysis is to be done on the drum brakes using four materials Stainless Steel, gray Cast iron, carbon carbon composite & aluminum metal matrix. The shoes of this kind of brake are contained within the drum and expand outwards when the brake is applied. Such kind of brakes is used in medium heavy-duty vehicles. Structural analysis is done on the drum brake to validate the strength of the drum brake and thermal analysis is done to analyze the thermal properties. Comparison can be done for deformation; stresses, temperature etc. form the three materials to check which material is best. Catia is a 3d modeling software widely used in the design process. ANSYS is general-purpose finite element analysis (FEA) software package. Finite Element Analysis is a numerical method of deconstructing a complex system into very small pieces (of user-designated size) called elements.