Temperature and thermoelastic instability at tread braking using cast iron friction material

Braking events in railway traffic often induce high frictional heating and thermoelastic instability (TEI) at the interfacing surfaces. In the present paper, two approaches are adopted to analyse the thermomechanical interaction in a pin-on-disc experimental study of railway braking materials. In a first part, the thermal problem is studied to find the heat partitioning between pin and disc motivated by the fact that wear mechanisms can be explained with a better understanding of the prevailing thermal conditions. The numerical model is calibrated using the experimental results. In a second part, the frictionally induced thermoelastic instabilities at the pin-disc contact are studied using a numerical method and comparing them with the phenomena observed in the experiments. The effects of temperature on material properties and on material wear are considered. It is found from the thermal analysis that the pin temperature and the heat flux to the pin increase with increasing disc temperatures up to a transition stage. This agrees with the behaviour found in the experiments. Furthermore, the thermoelastic analysis displays calculated pressure and the temperature distributions at the contact interface that are in agreement with the hot spot behaviour observed in the experiments