Keywords: liquid-cooled brake, disc-brake heating, failure modes, lightweight vehicle, numerical simulation, braking safety.

Railway brakes are designed to absorb a great amount of energy and therefore are heavy non-suspended components. Their mass depends on the cooling technology, even more if they are subject to successive load cycles. The major advantage of liquid cooling is that it significantly reduces the maximum temperature of the brakes and greatly shortens the time needed for them to return to ambient temperature after a heavy braking. The biggest challenge with liquid cooling is circulating the hot and cold water. The pipes can easily pass through the interior of a hollow shaft, but that rotating tube, integrated with the shaft, needs to be connected with another coaxial, non-rotating tube, integrated with the train’s structure. Since there are two separate flows, at different temperatures, the more simple arrangement is to dispose the inlet pipe, of fresh water, in one extremity and the outlet pipe, of hot water, in the opposite extremity. The numerical simulations suggest that this novel solution is promising, but it requires of course experimental testing.

download the full-text of this paper (PDF, 15 pages, 600 Kb)

go to the previous paper
go to the next paper
return to the table of contents
return to the volume description