Estimating the thermal parameters of a brake pad from experimental data

The aim of this thesis is to develop and test a reliable one-dimensional physical model of heat diffusion within the brake system of a car. The ITT company has been able to develop a brake pad, termed Smart Pad, that is endowed with sensors installed on the backplate, in particular a temperature sensor. The long-term goal of the research project developed with the ITT company is to use the data from this sensor to prevent the brake from overheating by estimating the disk temperature in real time. Since the backplate and the disk are the two opposite sides of the friction material it is necessary to model the heat propagation inside the pad. To this aim we use a one-dimensional model of heat conduction neglecting dissipation in other directions To validate the 1d-model, ITT conduct an experiment in controlled conditions collecting data that we use to estimate the thermal parameters of the pad. This approach is initially employed on synthetic data generated using the model, imposing initial and boundary conditions to study the of the model. Subsequently, experimental data provided by ITT are used. This study enabled the determination of the minimum conditions for identifiability and the identification of datasets and acquisition methodologies (other than those employed) that are optimal for parameter estimation.