Non-linear investigation of an asymmetric disk brake model

Among design engineers, it is known that breaking symmetries of a brake rotor can help to prevent squeal. From a modelling point of view, in the literature brake squeal is almost exclusively treated using models with a symmetric brake rotor, which are capable of explaining the excitation mechanism but yield no insight into the relation between rotor asymmetry and stability. In previous work, it has been demonstrated with linear models that the breaking of symmetries of the brake rotor has a stabilizing effect. The equations of motion for this case have periodic coefficients with respect to time and are therefore more difficult to analyse than in the symmetric case. The goal of this article is to investigate whether due to the breaking of symmetries also, the non-linear behaviour of the brake changes qualitatively compared to the symmetric case.