Contact Behaviour of Vehicle Drum Brake by Using Finite Element Analysis

An approach to study the contact analysis of drum brake squeal noise is presented based on three-dimensional Finite Element analysis using Ansys Program. The effect of friction material compressibility, coefficient of friction, and line pressure on the interface contact is examined. The modal analysis of the vehicle drum brake is also studied to get the natural frequency and instability of the drum. It is shown that the Unsymmetric modal analysis is efficient enough to solve this linear problem after transforming the non-linear behaviour of the contact between the drum and the friction material to a linear behaviour. A linear element which is Matrix27, used in the modal analysis is transferred to non-linear elements which are Targe170 and Conta173 to study the contact analysis. The contact problems are highly non-linear and require significant computer resources to solve it, however, the contact problem give two significant difficulties. Firstly, the region of contact is not known based on the boundary conditions, line pressure, and drum and friction material specifications. Secondly, these contact problems need to take the friction into consideration.