Friction material design has always been a big challenge to confront by the automotive industry: the brake pad material is nearly always tailored on the specific application, with widely diverse mission profiles and target priorities. In the very last years the mentioned variety is increasing and often becoming critical because of the coexistence of ICE and hybrid/full electric platforms together with the appearance of increasingly severe regulation limits. The proposed DoE approach provides high-level answers to face this complexity: mixture models have been developed and validated using dyno bench results over efficiency, performance and NVH procedures. The campaign has been repeated using different friction material types to derive general design guidelines.

Mr. Cristian Malmassari, Advanced Validation Engineering Coordinator, Brembo S.p.A.