Stochastic Analysis of Vehicle Brake Noise

Complex eigenvalue analysis (CEA) using NASTRAN has been a main tool to analyze brake noise in the automotive industry. However, CEA requires lots of fuzzy parameters such as contact stiffness and damping factors. Also, due to the chaotic nature of brake noise, it is very difficult and time consuming for the engineers to acquire reasonable correlation between test and simulation. Furthermore, the prediction of the noise before the hardware test is extremely difficult. Due to this limitation, CEA was used at the end of the vehicle development process, after the hardware test revealed the noise problem. To resolve these issues and improve the predictability of CEA, the integration of stochastic analysis with CEA is used and shows many improvements in brake noise simulation, which enables the engineers to be more proactive in preventing brake noise. This paper summarizes the stochastic analysis procedure and its application to brake noise simulation with two case studies.