外文原文：
THE BRAKE BIBLE
Brakes - what do they do?
The simple answer: they slow you down.
The complex answer: brakes are designed to slow down your vehicle but probably not by the means that you think. The common misconception is that brakes squeeze against a drum or disc, and the pressure of the squeezing action is what slows you down. This in fact is only part of the equation. Brakes are essentially a mechanism to change energy types. When you're travelling at speed, your vehicle has kinetic energy. When you apply the brakes, the pads or shoes that press against the brake drum or rotor convert that energy into thermal energy via friction. The cooling of the brakes dissipates the heat and the vehicle slows down. It's the First Law of Thermodynamics, sometimes known as the law of conservation of energy. This states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only be converted from one form to another. In the case of brakes, it is converted from kinetic energy to thermal energy.
Angular force. Because of the configuration of the brake pads and rotor in a disc brake, the location of th
e point of contact where the friction is generated also provides a mechanical moment to resist the turning motion of the rotor.
Thermodynamics, brake fade and drilled rotors.
If you ride a motorbike or drive a race car, you're probably familiar with the term brake fade, used to describe what happens to brakes when they get too hot. A good example is coming down
a mountain pass using your brakes rather than your engine to
slow you down. As you start to come down the pass, the brakes on your vehicle heat up, slowing you down. But if you keep using them, the rotors or drums stay hot and get no chance to cool off. At some point they can't absorb any more heat so the brake pads heat up instead. In every brake pad there is the friction material that is held together with some sort of resin and once this starts to get too hot, the resin starts to vapourise, forming a gas. Because the gas can't stay between the pad and the rotor, it forms a thin layer between the two whilst trying to escape. The pads lose contact with the rotor, reducing the amount of friction and voila. Complete brake fade.
The typical remedy for this would be to get the vehicle to a stop and wait for a few minutes. As the brak
e components cool down, their ability to absorb heat returns and the next time you use the brakes, they seem to work just fine. This type of brake fade was more common in older vehicles. Newer vehicles tend to have less outgassing from the brake pad compounds but they still suffer brake fade. So why? It's still to do with the pads getting too hot. With newer brake pad compounds, the pads transfer heat into the calipers once the rotors are too hot, and the brake fluid starts to boil forming bubbles in it. Because air is compressible (brake fluid isn't) when you step on the brakes, the air bubbles compress instead of the fluid transferring the motion to the brake calipers. Voila. Modern brake fade.
So how do the engineers design brakes to reduce or eliminate brake fade? For older vehicles, you give that vapourised gas somewhere to go. For newer vehicles, you find some way to cool the rotors off more effectively. Either way you end up with cross-drilled or grooved brake rotors. While grooving the surface may reduce the specific heat capacity of the rotor, its effect is negligible in the grand scheme of things. However, under heavy braking once everything is hot and the resin is vapourising, the grooves give the gas somewhere to go, so the pad can continue to contact the rotor, allowing you to stop.
The whole understanding of the conversion of energy is critical in understanding how and why brakes
do what they do, and why they are designed the way they are. If you've ever watched Formula 1 racing, you'll see the front wheels have huge scoops inside the wheel pointing to the front (see the picture above). This is to duct air to the brake components to help them cool off because in F1 racing, the brakes are used viciously every few seconds and spend a lot of their time trying to stay hot. Without
some form of cooling assistance, the brakes would be fine for the first few corners but then would fade and become near useless by half way around the track.
Rotor technology.
If a brake rotor was a single cast chunk of steel, it would have terrible heat dissipation properties and leave nowhere for t he vapourised gas to go. Because of this, brake rotors are typically modified with all manner of extra design features to help them cool down as quickly as possible as well as dissapate any gas from between the pads and rotors. The diagram here shows some examples of rotor types with the various modification that can be done to them to help them create more friction, disperse more heat more quickly, and ventilate gas. From left to right.
1: Basic brake rotor. 2: Grooved rotor - the grooves give more bite and thus more friction as they pass
between the brake pads They also allow gas to vent from between the pads and the rotor. 3: Grooved, drilled rotor - the drilled holes again give more bite, but also allow air currents (eddies) to blow through the brake disc to assist cooling and ventilating gas. 4: Dual ventilated rotors - same as before but now with two rotors instead of one, and with vanes in between them to generate a vortex which will cool the rotors even further whilst trying to actually 'suck' any gas away from the pads.
An important note about drilled rotors: Drilled rotors are typically only found (and to be used on) race cars. The drilling weakens the rotors and typically results in microfractures to the rotor. On race cars this isn't a problem - the brakes are changed after each race or weekend. But on a road car, this can eventually lead to brake rotor failure - not what you want. I only mention this because of a lot of performance suppliers will supply you with drilled rotors for street cars without mentioning this little fact.
Big rotors.
How does all this apply to bigger brake rotors - a common sports car upgrade? Sports cars and race bikes typically have much bigger discs or rotors than your average family car. A bigger rotor has more material in it so it can absorb more heat. More material also means a larger surface area for the pads t
o generate friction with, and better heat dissipation. Larger rotors also put the point of contact with the pads further away from the ax le of rotation. This provides a larger mechanical advantage to resist the turning of the rotor itself. To best illustrate how this works, imagine a spinning steel disc on an axle in front of you. If you clamped your thumbs either side of the disc close to the middle, your thumbs would heat up very quickly and you'd need to push pretty hard to generate the friction required to slow the disc down. Now imagine doing the same thing but clamping your thumbs together close to the outer rim of the disc. The disc w ill stop spinning much more quickly and your thumbs won't get as hot. That, in a nutshell explains the whole principle behind why bigger rotors = better stopping power.
The different types of brake.
sort of中文翻译All brakes work by friction. Friction causes heat which i s part of the kinetic energy conversion process. How they create friction is down to the various designs.
Bicycle wheel brakes
I thought I'd cover these because they're about the most basic type of functioning brake that you can see, watch working, and understand. The construction is very simple and out-in-the-open.
A pair of rubber blocks are attached to a pair of calipers which are pivoted on the frame. When you pull the brake cable, the pads are pressed against the side or inner edge of the bicycle wheel rim. The rubber creates friction, which creates heat, which is the transfer of kinetic energy that slows you down. There's only
really two types of bicycle brake - those on which each brake shoe shares the same pivot point, and those with two pivot points. If you can look at a bicycle brake and not understand what's going on, the rest of this page is going to cause you a bit of a headache.
Drum brakes - single leading edge
The next, more complicated type of brake is a drum brake.The concept here is simple. Two semicircular brake shoes sit inside a spinning drum which is attached to the wheel. When you apply the brakes, the shoes are expanded outwards to press against the inside of the drum. This creates friction, which creates he at, which transfers kinetic energy, which slows you down. The example below shows a simple model. The actuator in this case is the blue elliptical object. As that is twisted, it forces against the brake shoes and in turn forces them to expand outwards. The return spring is what pulls the shoes back away from the surface of the brake drum when the brakes are released. See the later section for more information on actuator types.
The "single leading edge" refers to the number of parts of the brake shoe which actually contact the spinning drum. Because the brake shoe pivots at one end, simple geometry means that the entire brake pad cannot contact the brake drum. The leading edge is the term given to the part of the brake pad which does contact the drum, and in the case of a single leading edge system, it's the part of the pad closest to the actuator. This diagram (right) shows what happens as the brakes are applied. The shoes are pressed outwards and the part of the brake pad which first contacts the drum is the leading edge. The action of the drum spinning actually helps to draw the brake pad outwards because of friction, which causes the brakes to "bite". The trailing edge of the brake

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