Thermal Engineering Design Project: Disk Brake Cooling Simulation
A thermal engineering design project involving simulated cooling of vented and nonvented disk brakes is described. A heated copper tube was rotated in a manner that replicated the motion of a single vented passageway inside a disk brake rotor. The class assignment required design and construction of equipment, and data reduction using the lumped heat capacity method to obtain heat transfer correlations. The seven student groups plus the author produced 238 data points which were collectively correlated into two Nusselt number curves. The curve for the nonvented brakes simulation was benchmarked against the published literature for a cylinder in crossflow; the deviation was about 31%. The results from the vented brakes simulation which, in addition to the external air flow, had an internal radial flow driven by the rotation produced a 30% cooling augmentation over the nonvented simulation.