Abstract
In Japan, the amount of purchases of sports-type bicycle and electric-powered bicycle have become large annually because of health consciousness and awareness of energy saving. For these bicycles, traveling speed gets higher. This makes brake systems more important for bicycle to stop the bicycle safely and reliably even in rainy weather, and to be able to easily control the traveling speed. In this study, we developed a rubber brake shoe filled with rice bran ceramics (RBC) particles, and evaluated the braking performances under simulated rain conditions using the apparatus simulated actual bicycle, comparing a commercially available brake shoe. One test cycle was conducted from 60 km/h to stop; the number of test repetition was 50 cycles to obtain the effect of duration. In the initial test cycles, the commercial shoe showed high friction coefficient but then the friction coefficient decreased. The shoe had high aggression to the aluminum alloy rim. In contrast, the RBC-filled shoe exhibited high and stable friction coefficient due to low aggression to the rim, regardless of the test repetition even at high traveling speed, and also showed low specific wear rate compared to the other samples. Therefore, the RBC-filled shoe can be said as a promising shoe with high controllability and high wear resistance under rain conditions.
