Fatigue Life Prediction of Heavy Duty Automobile’s Brake Drum through Coupled Thermo-Mechanical Analysis

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the methodology to simulate the induced stresses/strains due to thermo-mechanical loading of automobile brake drum.. The brake drum undergoes mechanical load due to applied brake pressure and thermal load due to friction generated between brake pad and brake drum while brake is applied. This coupled thermo-mechanical loading affects the life of the brake drum as the stiffness of the brake drum is reduced. The conventional method of simulating this problem is done using Lagrangian discretization in which the load is applied and inertia effect due to angular velocity is applied to a drum at static condition. In contrast, in this paper Eulerian discretization is adopted for finite element analysis, in which drum brake model is discretized as spatially dependent that facilitates actual rotation of brake drum with simultaneous application of brake load resulting more precise simulation. A sequentially coupled transient thermo-mechanical analysis is carried out using ABAQUS 6.12 simulation tool to predict the induced stresses/strains and fatigue life of the brake drum.