Sliding Wear and Friction Studies of Disc/ Pad Materials

Brake disc provides friction force with minimum weight loss on application of brake. The pad material only experiences more wear and friction. Disc and pad materials are selected to give a stable and high coefficient of friction (0.25-0.40). COF is directly proportional to braking force generated and inversely proportional to the stopping distance. The aim of the study is to identify a new material for replacement of pad material in practice. In this study, wear, hardness and friction properties of E glass fiber with epoxy resin and cashew friction dust composite are studied and compared with brake pad material in practice. The hardness was measured using shore hardness tester. The wear and friction was measured using the pin on disc wear testing machine. The pad material was made as pin with cast iron as the disc material for wear studies. The wear studies were conducted for various load conditions and sliding velocities. It was observed that the wear rate increases with increasing load and sliding velocities for all materials. The wear rate in E glass fibre epoxy composite and E glass fiber epoxy composite with cashew friction dust are considerably low when compared with asbestos and semi metallic material. Even at the highest load (10 kg), it does not wear heavily. It can be seen that the COF of E-Glass fibre epoxy composite with Cashew friction dust based material does not varies much. This indicates that E glass fibre epoxy composite with cashew friction dust has a good potential for using it as pad material in automotive application.