Brake Squeal: A Control Strategy Using Shunted Piezoelectric Pads

Abstract

Brake squeal has been a challenging issue to overcome for the automotive sector. The phenomenon often underpins more serious mechanical issues leading to poor user satisfaction, compromised safety, and a negative impact on the market. Automotive manufacturers are highly motivated to solve the squealing problem to prevent sudden failure of the brake system, which can be catastrophic. This article provides an approach to mitigate the squealing of brakes through the application of piezoelectric patches shunted by appropriately tuned electrical networks. The designated piezoelectric patches used with the brake pads can provide a unique characteristic, namely, being able to convert the mechanical energy of squealing brakes into electrical energy. This energy can be dispersed throughout an electrical network, fostering greater stability and damping risk factors of the brake system. This technique is envisioned as empowering the disc brake systems to perform across a range of operating parameters in a robust fashion, without experiencing brake squealing. The model proposed in this article is a multifield finite element model that includes two degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) disc brake system model as well as 2DOFs for the shunted piezoelectric network to independently control the brake modes of oscillation and hence to enable the mitigation of the squealing threshold. The brake system establishes the stability limits as a function of the design parameters of the shunted piezoelectric network. The effectiveness of the developed system is also provided in a numerical examples that shows the effectiveness of the shunted piezoelectric networks in controlling brake squeal phenomenon. The method proposed in this article can be applied to distributed disc brakes as an extension of the current work.