Abstract
The main challenge a designer faces in designing brake drum is simulating the thermal behavior of brake drums during the design phase, as a result the thermal performance of brake drum surfaces only when physical trials are performed. Commercially available CFD software like Fluent, CFX, Acu-solve, despite being accurate and efficient, require lot of skill on the part of designers and also require high end systems to run the required simulations. Another drawback of these solvers is the difficulty of doing multiple iterations due to high cycle time of 10-15 days. The research aims reducing the development cycle by bridging the gap between CAD modelling and CFD analysis. This method so developed uses a mathematical model which is based on thermodynamic and empirical relations. The developed mathematical model runs in a MATLAB environment and is a user interactive model taking inputs like velocity profile, Brake sizes, Brake drum weight and certain brake drum geometry parameters. Experimental data were collected on TEST vehicles having different brake parameters and compared with simulation result. The model has showed a good correlation with error percentage of 12-18% was achieved between the experimental data and the simulated data.