Brake design procedure

Our goal is to stop the vehicle in a straight line with all four wheels locked. Know to simplify this
I would break the statement into two parts. First, we need to lock all our four wheels which can
be achieved easily by generating enough braking torque to the wheels, but the we have to stop
our car in a straight line, to achieve this the brakes should be designed in such a way that
irrespective how the driver applies the force, rear wheels should lock after the locking of front
wheels.
Why is it important to lock the front before rear?
Let us assume a condition in which vehicle is under braking with no wheels locked and some
value of force is applied on the car laterally (due to slight wind, different frictional coefficient
etc). Also car is making slight angle with the axis in which it is traveling. So the lateral force will
be provided by the tire as shown in the figure. Know calculating the angular acceleration we will
get the equation shown below.

If rear wheels lock up α is positive which will increase slip angle(unstable) whereas if front wheels
lock up α will be negative which will decrease slip angle(stable).
We need to lock front wheel first to keep the car in a straight line as practically it is not possible
to lock all four wheels simultaneously, keeping that in mind we can start our designing procedure.
By knowing the car parameters like C.G height, Wheelbase, Static weight distribution we can find
the weight transfer at different deceleration values. After knowing dynamic weight distribution
we can calculate the braking force required at that particular deceleration for front and rear, We
will call that Optimum braking force.

As we can see optimum braking force is a quadratic equation in acceleration. So the curve of
front force Vs Rear force will be a parabola. But we all know that the force we will generate by
our hardware will be a linear function of applied foot force by the driver, we call that force as
generated force. After plotting these to curves on a graph we will get a graph as shown below.
At the point where the generated force intersect the optimum force curve, that is the value of
deceleration or Maximum coefficient of friction for which our car will pass the brake test for the
given selection of hardware if the value of µ is higher than that on the track then after the rear
wheel will start to lock first as the driver will increase the input force. So we to increase the slope
of generated force line to pass the brake test for higher value of µ on the track.
 The data available on the forum and talking to different teams 1.5g is a safe value to set
the limit for Maximum deceleration possible on the track. So to achieve that Different
combination of master cylinder and calipers are tried to get the desirable biasing for proper brake
lock.

PEDAL GEOMETRY
Shown in the figure the mounting of the balance bar is changed from last year, we face a
problem with the balance bar in this configuration. Whenever driver press the pedal the
balance bar moves in the vertical plane(one end of the bar comes towards driver other goes
away from the driver). We don’t know weather it causes any problem with brake biasing.
We are currently using the above shown Pedal geometry with Ap racing bearing mounted
master cylinder. The benefit of this geometry is that we can achieve higher values of pedal ratio
without increasing the length of the pedal. But we face some problem while calculating the
change in pedal ratio. As shown below initially we can say the driver is applying a force F
horizontally (assuming applied force by the driver horizontally is correct or not?) then the
reaction force is calculated easily but in final situation when the brake pedal is pressed and
making an angle α with the horizontal the angle between master cylinder and brake pedal is
decreased which results in higher reaction force for moment balance but as we are considering
horizontal application of force by the driver we will have sine component of that force which
will result in decrease of net applied moment. The combined effort of these two results in slight
decrease of pedal ratio.

Possible solution for the problem

1. The effect of movement of the balance bar on the brake biasing is to be checked by
using two pressure sensor.