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Braking system components generally are safety critical products. Commercial vehicles braking systems are of highly safety critical as they pose a serious threat to life and property. Therefore, a system must be designed and validated to minimize the effects of component failure of these portfolios of products. In order to avoid accidents due to brake failures, this paper mainly focuses on analysis of loss of pneumatic fluid pressure in the components of the braking systems. Leakage of pneumatic fluid pressure through the sealing in braking system is one of the major reasons for the failure of the brakes in the vehicles. The aim of the present study is to simulate the lab failure and improve the design using finite element analysis. Also, the optimized design is validated by experimentally. A finite element model is developed in Ansys Workbench to study the behavior of the sealing ring under assembly conditions.

Reliable sealing solutions are extremely important in commercial vehicle industry because sealing failures can cause vehicle breakdown, damage of equipment or even accident, incurring expenses that are substantially higher than the costs of just replacing the damaged seals. Consequently, new seal designs must be experimentally verified and validated before they can be implemented. In this study, Mooney - Rivlin hyper elastic material model is used to simulate the sealing behavior during dynamic conditions. The seal under study is a large diameter lip seal made of Neoprene® rubber (NBR) A finite element model to study the response of the seal under dynamic conditions was developed. The analysis took into account the mating parts dimensions and the lip seal parameters. Three designs were proposed and verified. The seal design is optimized using non-linear FEA and validated. Results include contact pressure, deflection and strain experienced by the seal during actuation.

Pneumatic valves are widely used in heavy commercial vehicles’ air braking systems. These valves are mainly used in the braking system layout to maintain the vehicle stability during dynamic conditions. Rubber components are inevitable in valves as a sealing element, and it is very difficult to predict the behavior due to its nonlinear nature. Basically, this valve efficiency is defined in terms of performance and response characteristics. These characteristics are determined in the concept stage itself using 1D simulation software. AMESim software has a variety of elements to use in a unique way for performance and response behavior prediction. For pneumatic valves, 1D analysis is an effective method and it gives good correlation with actual test results. During the modelling of pneumatic valves, some of the contacts between rubber and metals are controlled by various parameters such as damping, contact stiffness and desired phase angle.