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High frequency brake squeal is often suppressed by applying an insulator to the shoe plate of the pad. This may increase the damping and change the coupling conditions in a favorable way, but detailed knowledge about which of the several effects of insulators that are most important is not at hand. A joint effort is needed to increase the understanding of the effects of insulators. This paper describes a new way of measuring the shear stiffness and damping of insulators. The method can be used to measure either the individual layers in an insulator or the complete insulator that is build up of several layers. The method does not rely on the resonant behavior of a structure and it therefore allows for measurements of the parameters over a wide frequency range. The measurement setup can be placed in a temperature chamber and this allows the parameters to be measured over a wide temperature range.

Disc brake squeal is a very complicated phenomenon, and the influence of insulators in suppressing squeal is not fully understood. The aim of this paper is increase the understanding of the effect of insulators. A previous paper [1] presented an experimental technique for measuring the frequency- and temperature- dependent properties of viscoelastic materials currently used in insulators. The present work continues by considering the coupled vibrations of the brake pad and insulator. A comparison of natural frequencies found from experimental modal analysis and finite element modeling indicates agreement to with 5%. Experimentally determined modal loss factors of the brake pad vary dramatically with frequency, changing by a factor of 2 over the frequency range 2-11 kHz. A method for including this frequency dependence, as well as the frequency dependence of the insulator material, in state-of-the-art finite element software is proposed.

This paper provides a systematic approach to identify the root cause of the squeal noise of a disc brake by using advanced experimental tools. Modal analysis was used to identify the modal participation factors when the brake was squealing according to the reproduced squeal phenomenon and acquired operational displacement shape (ODS) using pulsed electronic speckle pattern interferometry. Modal coupling between the disc and pad/caliper assembly is found to be the key to produce squeal. It has been demonstrated that using mass loading/damping can de-couple the modes between the disc and pad/caliper assembly and reduce the assembly vibration from which the squeal is eliminated.

This paper first gives a brief review on brake squeal mechanisms and then studies in-plane modes/friction process and their contribution to disc brake squeal. Pulsed laser electronic speckle pattern interferometry was used to acquire the operational deflection shape (ODS) of a disc brake when it was squealing. Laser vibrometry was used to obtain mode shapes of brake discs/rotors including both the out-of-plane (transverse) modes and in-plane (radial or tangential) modes. The rubbing friction process with a non-rotation rotor under a free-free boundary condition was used to simulate friction-induced vibration. The coupling between in-plane modes and out-of-plane modes/vibration is believed to be the key to produce squeal. The in-plane modes tend to control the squeal frequency, and the out-of-plane modes/vibration are efficient to generate noise. Many case studies have shown that high frequency disc brake squeal occurs at one or some of its rotor in-plane resonant frequencies.