A STUDY ON THE THERMAL FATIGUE TEST AND ANALYSIS METHOD FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF BRAKE DISK MATERIALS

In the disk braking of the railway trains, kinetic energy of the vehicles is converted into thermal energy by friction between a brake disk and the pad materials. This can be cause of the iterative thermal shock and generates thermal cracks on the brake disk surface. In this study, we show the comparative thermal fatigue test procedures and thermal crack analysis process to evaluate the thermal fatigue characteristics of candidate materials designed for development of heat-resistant brake disk material. We carried out tests on the conventional brake disk materials used for Saemaul and Mugunghwa trains, then we comparatively analyzed the thermal crack initiation and propagation on the surface of a specimen. A thermal fatigue test procedure and a crack analysis process were suggested to evaluate the heat resistance of the developed materials at later studies.