Flow and Thermal Analysis of a Racing Car Braking System

The braking system of a racing car is one of the main design challenges. The flow around and inside the wheel of an F1 car with all braking system components is analyzed in order to evaluate the heat transfer after a braking event. Very few studies have been published on this topic, mainly due to the high confidentiality level in the racing car sector. In the present work, using an actual geometry of an early 2000s F1 car, the braking system is simulated using a CFD approach. The boundary conditions for the wheel and brake system are taken from the simulation of a vehicle model with a front wing. Different heat transfer phenomena are progressively added to the model in order to understand their effects, including thermal convection only, radiation and conjugate heat transfer. Two different vehicle velocities are simulated to quantify and compare the heat removal after a braking event. The different heat transfer mechanisms have dramatic effects on the prediction of the brake cooling results, and these are quantified in order to understand the limitations of the simplified approaches. Finally, the influence of the ambient pressure at two different altitudes on the heat transfer from a braking event is studied.