Source: Bruker Nano Surfaces
The following article on brake materials is excerpted from a story posted on azom.com. The entire post, with graphics, can be viewed by clicking on this sentence.
BILLERICA, Mass.- A brake material must ultimately meet the requirements of the vehicle for which it is made. It frequently contains upwards of 20 alternate ingredients and requires several processing steps.
It is difficult to simulate on-vehicle braking performance features in an inertia brake dynamometer test, but it has been considered in the past to be even more difficult to do so in a small-scale bench test.
Bruker’s Brake Material Screening Module
The friction behavior of brake material formulations can now be pre-screened before submission to full-scale inertia dynamometer testing, thanks to Bruker’s brake material screening module for the UMT TriboLab platform.
The brake material screening module is supplied with a template that translates the majority of the brake-specific conditions from the most commonly used OEM dynamometer tests (such as the AK-Master test or the SAE J2522) to be replicated on the TriboLab system.
The coefficient of friction (COF) is attained for various conditions such as recovery, fade, cold, motorway, speed or pressure sensitivity, burnish, and green. Development time is made much more efficient by these screening tests.
Friction material developers can analyze the impact of several variables, including humidity, temperature, speed, and contact pressure in a highly controlled environment with a high-resolution observation of the data details.
Along with the COF behavior of the latest brake material formulations, recent interest in the development of brake material is also focused on understanding and evaluating the generation of particles (such as the wear debris).
This contemporary aspect of research can additionally be explored with Bruker’s brake particle collection chamber on the TriboLab tester. The particle collection system provides several collection techniques, according to the requirements of the user.
Particles can be acquired on adhesive-backed collection strips, which can be masked at various testing stages, or gathered from the easy-to-clean-and remove bottom tray and chamber, or by using an in-line filter and vacuum pump system for particle separation by size.
