Brake Insulator Development: Thermal and Structural Dynamic Semi-Empirical Design Guidance/Data Synthesis Methods

The brake insulator performs a significant function when properly designed in controlling the brake system high frequency dynamic instabilities leading to brake squeal. The second major challenge is thermal management. It provides the direct heat flow, storage and corresponding temperature differential profile between the rotor and piston. Suboptimal thermal control can lead to lower operational bands of damping outside of the peak loss factor range, variation in modal dynamics with temperature, heat aging and degradation of elastomer/visco-elastic polymer physical properties [2, 3]. Design of the insulator is dictated by the unique squeal signature (and associated thermal cycles) specific to the brake corner architecture. Short time frame insulator solutions are typically required in the later development stages with no latitude for design modification flexibility.

The use of numerical approximation and semi-empirical tools provide the flexibility to address compressed development time. This allows provision for a greater number of alternative solutions to be assessed and significant reduction in hardware and test resources and time during the insulator selection process. This paper demonstrates efficiencies obtained through integration of the underlying thermal and Oberst based beam based theories with empirical data results to provide directional guidance of alternative designs and the ability to synthesize data from existing results without additional testing.