Wear of disc brakes and block brakes – influence of design on modelled wear for repeated brake cycles

Paper in proceeding, 2010

A numerical study is presented where the wear of the brake block / brake pad is estimated for railway tread brakes / disc brakes employing an implemented temperature-dependent wear model. The influence of the stiffness of the interacting parts on the wear of pad / block is studied by use of finite element simulations. Both total wear and its spatial and temporal variations are calculated. The impact of some key design parameters is illustrated. It is found that the wear of those (stiffer) friction materials which exhibit thermoelastic instabilities (banding) during braking is particularly sensitive to changes of the braking conditions, resulting in large variations of the accumulated wear. For these materials the stiffness of the block /pad mounting is also a key factor, where a too stiff mounting can result in a wear increase by up to 50%.