Brake Squeal – Digital Twinning of a Brake Dynamometer 2023-01-1884

Brake squeal is a common phenomenon across all types of vehicles. It becomes prominent in the absence of other noise sources, as in the case of electric vehicles. Earlier simulation attempts date back to late nineties and early 2000s. Identification of unstable modes of the coupled system of brake rotor and pads, and occasionally some caliper components, was the primary goal. Simulating the rotation of the rotor along with squeezing of the pads was attempted in a multi-body dynamics tools with flexible representation of rotor and pads. Though this gave some insights into the dynamics of stopping mechanism, squeal required capturing the nonlinearities of the contact in a more rigorous sense. Also, efforts were made to capture noise from vibrations using boundary- and finite- element methods [1]. In this attempt at digitalizing a brake dynamometer, the author used a nonlinear implicit solver to mimic the dynamics and transient vibro-acoustic solver to convert transient vibrations to transient squeal spectra. An icing on the cake is the auralization of the squeal event that generates the audio file which can be later re-played. To capture the stochastic nature of brake event in a more computationally efficient way, the author proposes a linear approximation and synthesizes multiple squeal events from a single nonlinear solution.