Disc brakes have evolved over time to be a reliable method of decelerating and stopping a vehicle. There have been different designs of disc brake systems for different applications. This review gives a detailed description of different geometries of the components and the materials used in a disc brake system. In spite of all the improvements, there are still many operational issues related to disc brakes that need to be understood in a greater detail and resolved. There has been a lot of research going on about these issues and at the same time different methods are being proposed to eliminate or reduce them. There has also been an intensive fundamental research going on about the evolution of tribological interface of disc-pad system. One major purpose of the present paper is to give a comprehensive overview of all such developments.

In this paper, we propose a stabilized augmented Lagrange multiplier method for the finite element solution of small deformation elastic contact problems. We limit ourselves to friction-free contact with a rigid obstacle, but the formulation is readily extendable to more complex situations.

Many engineering design optimization problems involve multiple conflicting objectives, which today often are obtained by computational expensive finite element simulations. Evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) methods based on surrogate modeling is one approach of solving this class of problems. In this paper, multi-objective optimization of a disc brake system to a heavy truck by using EMO and radial basis function networks (RBFN) is presented. Three conflicting objectives are considered. These are: 1) minimizing the maximum temperature of the disc brake, 2) maximizing the brake energy of the system and 3) minimizing the mass of the back plate of the brake pad. An iterative Latin hypercube sampling method is used to construct the design of experiments (DoE) for the design variables. Next, thermo-mechanical finite element analysis of the disc brake, including frictional heating between the pad and the disc, is performed in order to determine the values of the first two objectives for the DoE. Surrogate models for the maximum temperature and the brake energy are created using RBFN with polynomial biases. Different radial basis functions are compared using statistical errors and cross validation errors (PRESS) to evaluate the accuracy of the surrogate models and to select the most accurate radial basis function. The multi-objective optimization problem is then solved by employing EMO using the strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm (SPEA2). Finally, the Pareto fronts generated by the proposed methodology are presented and discussed.

In this paper an ecient sequential approach for simulating thermal stresses in brake discs for repeated braking is presented. First a frictional heat analysis is performed by using an Eulerian formulation of the disc. Then, by using the temperature history from the rst step of the sequence, a plasticity analysis with temperature dependent material data is performed in order to determine the corresponding thermal stresses. Three-dimensional geometries of a disc and a pad to a heavy truck are considered in the numerical simulations. The contact forces are computed at each time step taking the thermal deformations of the disc and pad into account. In such manner the frictional heat power distribution will also be updated in each time step, which in turn will inuence the development of heat bands. The plasticity model is taken to be the von Mises yield criterion with linear kinematic hardening, where both the hardening and the yield limit are temperature dependent. The results show that during hard braking high compressive stresses are generated on the disc surface in the circumferential direction which cause yielding. But when the disc cools down, these compressive stresses transform to tensile residual stresses. For repeated hard braking when this kind of stress history is repeated, we also show that stress cycles with high amplitudes are developed which might generate low cycle fatigue cracks after a few braking cycles.

Contact is the principal way load is transferred to a body. The study of stresses and deformations arising due to contact interaction of solid bodies is thus of paramount importance in many engineering applications. In this work, problems involving contact interactions are investigated using finite element modeling. In the first part, a new augmented Lagrangian multiplier method is implemented for the finite element solution of contact problems. In this method, a stabilizing term is added to avoid the instability associated with overconstraining the non-penetration condition. Numerical examples are presented to show the influence of stabilization term. Furthermore, dependence of error on different parameters is investigated. In the second part, a disc brake is investigated by modeling the disc in an Eulerian framework which requires significantly lower computational time than the more common Lagrangian framework. Thermal stresses in the brake disc are simulated for a single braking operation as well as for repeated braking. The results predict the presence of residual tensile stresses in the circumferential direction which may cause initiation of radial cracks on the disc surface after a few braking cycles. It is also shown that convex bending of the pad is the major cause of the contact pressure concentration in middle of the pad which results in the appearance of a hot band on the disc surface. A multi-objective optimization study is also performed, where the mass of the back plate, the brake energy and the maximum temperature generated on the disc surface during hard braking are optimized. The results indicate that a brake pad with lowest possible stiffness will result in an optimized solution with regards to all three objectives. Finally, an overview of disc brakes and related phenomena is presented in a literature review. In the third part, a lower limb donned in a prosthetic socket is investigated. The contact problem is solved between the socket and the limb while taking friction into consideration to determine the contact pressure and resultant internal stress-strain in the soft tissues. Internal mechanical conditions and interface stresses for three different socket designs are compared. Skin, fat, fascia, muscles, large blood vessels and bones are represented separately, which is novel in this work