Effect of Sliding Speed on the Thermal Stresses of Single-Disk Friction Clutches

The friction clutch is considered an essential machine element in the power transmission system, whereas the friction clutches are used widely in many applications of mechanical engineering, especially in the automotive vehicles. Most of failures happen in the elements surfaces of the clutch system due to the excessive heat generated through the early stage of the engagement period. In this paper, the finite element technique is applied to compute the variation of the heat generated due to friction, temperature and thermal stresses through the heating stage of the friction clutch. The simulation of working of the friction clutch has been accomplished using developed axisymmetric finite element models. The results present the distributions of frictional heat generated and thermal stress during the sliding period. The results proved that the non-uniformity of the pressure distribution is responsible for generating the high local frictional heat generated in some zones of nominal contact area through the heating stage and this will lead to a high increase in the thermal stresses.