FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF A DISC BRAKE

For our numerical methods class my group and I (David Huang, Felix Wong, Tomasz Zablotny, and Umar Bhutta) performed thermal finite element analysis on disc brakes using ANSYS AIM. This was an excellent project as it really exposed us to how FEA works in the industry as well as the professional software used.

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We researched and learned the various thermodynamic phenomena needed including conduction, convection, and radiation, and were able to see results that were similar to test data we had acquired.

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Disparities arose for a couple of reasons. The main reason being that this problem we examined was inherently transient, however this version of ANSYS could only model steady state, so we were forced to approximate. As well, due to time constraints for the project we were unable to perform a full CFD analysis as well, which would be important for this situation.

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In the end we were awarded with the best technical implementation in the class, which wasvery nice to receive after all the work we had put in.

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Below you will find images of our ANSYS implementation, our final presentation board, examples of disc brakes we modeled ours after, our CAD implementation of the disc brake, as well as the award received.