The Effect of Road Grit Particles on Brake Pad Surface Topography under Squealing Condition

Brake squeal has been and remains a challenging issue to vehicle manufacturers due to its complicated interaction between structural dynamics and tribological aspects. A significant number of studies have been done previously either on structural dynamics or tribological aspects alone or combination of these two aspects. It is seen that very limited studies have been conducted to assess the contribution of grit particles or road particles which contains silica sand, dust, wear debris, airborne particle, granite and many more on brake squeal occurrences based on brake pad surface characterizations. Thus, this paper attempts to examine the effect of grit particles on brake pad surface topography and subsequently its correlation with squeal generation. In doing so, road grit particles with the size of 400-500 μm will be used and fed into the disc brake end corner. Surface topography of the NAO (Non Asbestos Organic) brake pad with grit particles will be analyzed and compared with the authors' previous work using scanning electron microscope (SEM) and energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDX).