Analytical Model for Prediction of Friction Materials Durability Based on the Braking Energy Dissipation

Great numbers of studies in sliding wear phenomena use the wear rate to quantify material losses. However, in more recent works, some authors have been tried to characterize the wear phenomena by means of the energy dissipation between the contact surfaces of the bodies. The aim of this work is to create an analytical model capable to relate the total energy dissipated by a friction material during a bench wear test and data collected directly in a vehicle brake, in order to predict the durability of this component in service life. To attain this aim, the concept of specific wear volume, SWV, is adopted. The specific wear volume is the relationship between the material wear volume and the energy dissipated during a sliding wear process. In addition, a method to calculate the energy dissipation on friction materials is presented. A rule of wear damage accumulation, similar to the Palmgren-Miner hypothesis used for fatigue problems, is applied to predict the durability of the vehicle's friction material by means of the SWV index. The authors intend that the methodology presented in this work can be applied to predict the life of the friction material independently of its characteristics, sub-components properties, manufacturing process and vehicle's application working temperature of the brakes.