Statistical analysis of brake squeal noise

Despite substantial research efforts applied to the prediction of brake squeal noise since the early 20th century, the mechanisms behind its generation are still not fully understood. Squealing brakes are of significant concern to the automobile industry, mainly because of the costs associated with warranty claims. In order to remedy the problems inherent in designing quieter brakes and, therefore, to understand the mechanisms, a design of experiments study, using a noise dynamometer, was performed by a brake system manufacturer to determine the influence of geometrical parameters (namely, the number and location of slots) of brake pads on brake squeal noise. The experimental results were evaluated with a noise index and ranked for warm and cold brake stops. These data are analysed here using statistical descriptors based on population distributions, and a correlation analysis, to gain greater insight into the functional dependency between the time-averaged friction coefficient as the input and the peak sound pressure level data as the output quantity. The correlation analysis between the time-averaged friction coefficient and peak sound pressure data is performed by applying a semblance analysis and a joint recurrence quantification analysis. Linear measures are compared with complexity measures (nonlinear) based on statistics from the underlying joint recurrence plots. Results show that linear measures cannot be used to rank the noise performance of the four test pad configurations. On the other hand, the ranking of the noise performance of the test pad configurations based on the noise index agrees with that based on nonlinear measures: the higher the nonlinearity between the time-averaged friction coefficient and peak sound pressure, the worse the squeal. These results highlight the nonlinear character of brake squeal and indicate the potential of using nonlinear statistical analysis tools to analyse disc brake squeal.