In the last past years, one of the major trends in Computer Aided Design has been to make extensive use of computation and simulation to improve already existing products by widening the design space explorable by the single engineer. This paper aims at investigating the use of generative design and topology optimization techniques to improve products whose design has not changed radically over the years. The product under investigation is a disk brake floating caliper that is the most common solution for commercial vehicles. A floating caliper has pistons on only one side of the disc and, therefore, when the caliper acts, it must slide in order to bring the pad on the opposite side in contact with the disc. It makes the braking system reliable to disk’s defect and distortion takes less space at the wheel side and saves weight compared to a fixed caliper solution. All the advantages come to a prince that is the less stiff of the floating solution compared to the fixed one, both at component and brake system levels. Increasing the stiffness of the floating caliper while keeping its weight under control is desirable both from performance and fuel consumption point of view. The solution here proposed aims at exploiting two new ways to approach the engineering design process and evaluate which one is more suitable for problems of this kind. The generative design generates a certain number of outputs that meet certain constraints, and the engineer is in charge to explore the design space by changing minimal and maximal values of the variables specified at the beginning. Topology optimization gives instead an optimal solution; however, the designer does not have any insight about the robustness and stability of the optimal point. In other words, little variations from the simulation condition can lead to an unstable and very-different solution with respect to the optimal one. Since the component under investigation is also critical-safe is something to take into consideration in the choice of the approach. Different off-the-shelf software packages have been used to perform the computation and the simulation conditions have been drawn reasonably to reflect the operating condition of the component with the objective of maximizing its stiffness. The comparison and the improvements on the final designs have been drawn taken as reference to the original caliper.

Despite similar at a first sight, the two methods lead to different solutions and a question arises spontaneously: are the solutions provided by software tools overlapping?


Generative Design and Topology Optimization of Disk Brake Floating Carrier

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

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