Brake pad wear progressively changes the pad–disc contact interface and can influence braking performance, wear uniformity, and component durability. This study presents a finite element-based procedure for predicting brake pad wear under braking conditions using generalized Archard’s wear law as the base framework.
The method combines contact-pressure and slip-distance calculations with iterative geometry updating in Abaqus using the UMESHMOTION and USDFLD subroutines so that accumulated wear and evolving contact conditions can be continuously reflected during the analysis. To improve robustness in repeated-cycle wear simulation, a wear-direction algorithm, an extrapolation factor, and a contact stiffness scale factor are incorporated to reduce element distortion, enhance numerical stability, and control computational cost.
Because temperature-dependent friction behavior, contact conditions, and material-property variations are strongly coupled in actual braking, their combined influence is represented through an effective wear coefficient calibrated from physical data using regression analysis, instead of independently modeling them. The proposed procedure was applied to burnish and subsequent evaluation modes, and the predicted wear results were compared with test measurements. Among the regression models considered, the log-linear model provided the best overall agreement with the experimental wear data. The results show that the proposed framework can reproduce both mean wear and location-dependent wear trends with good agreement over the evaluated operating range. The proposed procedure offers a practical numerical workflow for predicting brake pad wear under temperature-dependent operating conditions while maintaining acceptable numerical stability and computational cost.