Structure analysis and optimization of brake pad for disk brake squeal suppression

The brake squeal during automobile braking seriously affects the comfortableness and quality of automobile products. To analyze the effect factor on brake squeal, disk brake squeal experiments and simulation were carried out with a disk brake test bench and finite element method. It is found that the grooving and chamfering on the brake pad friction surface have a great influence on the brake squeal. The number of unstable modes and the tendency of instability of the pad with a single groove on the pad friction surface are lower than that with a double groove. The orthogonal tests are designed to analyze the effect of the pad structure factors on the brake squeal, including groove angle, groove width, groove depth, chamfer length, and chamfer angle. Combined with the results of orthogonal tests, an optimization strategy based on the response surface methodology is proposed to suppress the brake squeal with the minimum tendency of instability value as the optimization objective. The optimization results show that compared with the initial model, the optimized model shows that the number of squeal modes decreases from order 8 to order 1, which decreases by 87.5%, and the tendency of instability decreases from 155.29 to 5.09, which decreases by 96.7%. It can be found from the optimization results that the optimized model is more stable with a lower tendency to brake squeal.