Article
Breakthrough for Brake Design
Friction-induced brake squeal has been a challenging issue for the automotive industry for decades; it has become particularly important today as other sources of noise have been reduced or eliminated. TRW and other brake producers previously relied on a brake-squeal simulation method in which interfaces between brake pads, rotors and other components were manually modeled prior to performing structural analysis.
The weakness of this approach is that it requires assumptions of how the components contact each other that then must be validated by physical testing. This takes considerable time and money, and delays the product development process.