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The continuous decrease in background noise levels inside vehicles has made other noise sources easily noticeable. Specifically, foundation brake rattle noise is a growing concern to the customer. This brake rattle is primarily due to rigid body impact between brake components. Currently, vehicle and brake manufacturing companies use different testing procedures to evaluate brake rattle that include laboratory vibration shakers, full vehicle shakers (four post), chassis dynamometers and vehicle road testing. These evaluations are subjective in most cases. A method is needed to replicate and quantify vehicle brake rattle in the laboratory to help determine the acceptability of a brake system at a component level. This approach would also help to identify the root cause for brake rattle and evaluate design changes to address that rattle. Some guidelines for better quantifying brake rattle using shakers will be proposed in this paper.

Today's newer friction materials and brake systems are able to operate under extreme conditions that are not normally evaluated with the standard squeal rig procedures. This could cause some discrepancy between the squeal rig test results and the vehicle test results like Los Angeles City Traffic Test (LACT). In some cases the noise behavior of brake systems could change dramatically and take us by surprise with new squeal frequencies being uncovered or get flagged due to high occurrences. This discrepancy could also be a major handicap with respect to developing a noise fix in the lab if the squeal cannot be reproduced. In this paper, we evaluated some case studies where some extreme conditionings especially related to thermal inputs drastically changed the squeal behavior of the brake system.