Production of Brake Pad Material for Industrial Application

Brake pads is widely applied in industries on heavy equipment such as cement rotary kilns, ball mills and turbines to enables precise positioning for maintenance activities and increases the safety of equipment as it cannot move once the brake is engaged. Brakes are used on inching systems to prevent rotation of the drive train after power is removed from the system. This research work focuses on development of brake pad material from carbonized doum palm shell, talc and blend of vulcanized rubber (VR) and phenolic resin (PR) were as binder. The best PR and VR blend's where determine from wear rate and compressive strength. the blend S2 with PR/VR 70/30 exhibits the highest compression strength and low wear rate were chosen as the optimal blend for the binder. The production parameters such as moulding temperature, moulding pressure, curing time and curing temperature were optimized using Box-Behnken design in response surface methodology (RSM). Moulding pressure of 150 MPa, moulding temperature of 120 oC, curing time of 113.9 min at 200 oC were the optimized values obtained for the production of the brake pad material. Five different blend compositions for the brake pad material were produced using carbonized doum palm shell, Talc and PR/VR blend as binder. The properties of the composite produced were analyzed. The wear resistance of 0.000126 g/s was obtained as the lowest at composite blend 3, compressive strength of 45.08 MPa, the thermal stability found good and suitable for industrial application. Oil and water absorption were found to be within acceptable limits 0.45% to 0.72% and 0.26% to 0.56% by weight and density of the material for all the blends is between 1.57 to 3.53 g/cm3 . All the values obtained are within range for optimal performance of brake pad materials for industrial application especially the cement kiln whose standard minimum values for thermal stability, coefficient of friction, wear rate, compressive strength, water and oil absorption and density are 500oC, 0.3, 0.0001g/s, 42 MPa, 1% and 5% and 2.5g/cm3.