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Effective cooling of a heated brake system is critical for vehicle safety and reliability. While some flow devices can redirect airflow more favorably for convective cooling, such a change typically accompanies side effects, such as increased aerodynamic drag and inferior control of brake dust particles. The former is critical for fuel efficiency while the latter for vehicle’s soiling and corrosion as well as non-exhaust emissions. These competing objectives are assessed in this study based on the numerical simulations of an installed brake system under driving conditions. The thermal behavior of the brake system as well as aerodynamic impact and brake dust particle deposition on areas of interest are solved using a coupled 3D transient flow solver, PowerFLOW. Typical design considerations related to enhanced brake cooling, such as cooling duct, wheel deflector, and brake air deflector, are characterized to evaluate the thermal, aerodynamic and soiling performance targets.

Brake disc materials are being utilised that have low noise/dust properties, but are sensitive to contamination by surface water. This drives large dust shields, making brake cooling increasingly difficult. However, brake cooling must be delivered without compromising aerodynamic drag and hence CO2 emissions targets. Given that front brake discs sit in a region of geometric, packaging and flow complexity optimization of their performance requires the analysis of thermal, aerodynamic and multi-phase flows. Some of the difficulties inherent in this task would be alleviated if the complete analysis could be performed in the same CAE environment: utilizing common models and the same solver technology. Hence the project described in this paper has sought to develop a CFD method that predicts the amount of contamination (water) that reaches the front brake discs, using a standard commercial code already exploited for both brake disc thermal and aerodynamics analysis.