Abstract
Recently, the brake noise reduction is one of the most important environmental issues for railway passenger transportation. In this study, a friction-induced self-excited oscillation of a tread brake system was numerically investigated by using finite element models for the brake shoe and wheel. The study was based upon a dynamic instability analysis giving unstable coupled modes of the brake shoe under the contact and Coulomb friction between the elastic shoe and rigid wheel. It is found that the brake squeal occurs when the two vibration modes of the shoe were coupled with the increase of the friction coefficient. The illustrative numerical results demonstrated the capability of the prediction of the brake squeal.
