Abstract:The goal of this work is to study the wear behavior of materials that have the potential to be used as brake pad materials under different contact loads and speeds instead of asbestos. The three different brake pad materials studied are flax fiber reinforced phenolic composites (FFRC), basalt fiber reinforced phenolic composites (BFRC), and flax/basalt reinforced hybrid phenolic composites (HFRC). A wear mechanism map was developed by using the fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm method (FCM) to study the wear mechanism of composites. The results showed BFRC to be a better brake pad material than the other fiber reinforced composites studied, because the good thermal characteristics and bonding nature of basalt fiber increased the wear resistance of BFRC considerably.

Fibre-reinforced polymer composites exhibit excellent mechanical and tribological properties. Due to these reasons, they are used in many engineering applications such as transmission and brake systems. In the present study, the wear mechanism of flax and basalt fibre-reinforced phenolic composites was studied using a pin-on-disc wear tester. The sliding conditions such as sliding velocity and normal force varied from 0.1 to 0.5 m/s and 9.81 to 49.04 N, respectively. The wear map of worn-out specimens were analysed using wear mechanism map developed using Fuzzy Clustering Method. Scanning Electron microscopy photographs were examined and wear map was correlated. Different wear mechanisms that dominated a particular wear regime were discussed in this paper.

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