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Emergency Braking of Ventilated Caliper Shoe on Rail (Hybrid HEX8 + TET4)
2-body B-Rep assembly of a ventilated brake shoe with cooling channels and suspension arch sliding along a profiled rail track on a conformal hybrid 513 HEX8 + 4,546 TET4 mesh with finite-kinematics HHT-α Coulomb friction.
During emergency rail braking, tangential Coulomb friction acts below the center of mass of the ventilated brake shoe, generating a nose-dive pitching moment that overloads the leading edge of the friction pad. This 2-body B-Rep model combines a 30-face rail track (with 3 swept HEX8 boundary layers on the base flange, minScaledJacobian = 0.323) and a 22-face ventilated brake shoe with transverse cooling slots and a pin-arch clevis. Solved over 220 implicit HHT-α time steps (875 Newton-Raphson iterations), the shoe decelerates from v₀ = 1.0 m/s to a full stop at 196.37 mm (within 2.29% of the analytical Coulomb stopping distance).
1. Geometry & FEA Mesh
- •2 B-Rep solid bodies (52 CAD faces total): profiled rail track (500 × 160 mm base with 4 fastener pockets and 2 web windows) and ventilated brake shoe (120 × 100 mm friction pad with 2 cooling channels and suspension arch).
- •Conformal hybrid mesh: 513 8-node hexahedra (HEX8) in 3 bottom flange layers node-matched to 4,546 4-node tetrahedra (TET4), totaling 2,050 nodes and 6,150 DOFs.
- •Coulomb frictional contact (μ = 0.28, slip regularization 1e-4 m) with finite-sliding kinematics across 21 saved time frames.
2. Loads & Boundary Conditions
- •Rail bottom flange fixed across all translational DOFs (fix surface number 8).
- •Normal clamping acceleration load (az = −9.81 m/s²) ramped smoothly over t = 0…0.02 s.
- •Initial sliding velocity v₀ = {1.0, 0, 0} m/s prescribed on the ventilated brake shoe (Body 2).
3. Simulation Results & Findings
- ✓Full frictional arrest achieved at t = 0.44 s after 220 time steps and 875 Newton-Raphson iterations (3.98 iterations/step average).
- ✓Simulated stopping distance is 196.37 mm vs. analytical Coulomb benchmark 191.98 mm (2.285% relative error).
- ✓Leading-edge average von Mises stress (2,240.8 Pa, peak 4,598.2 Pa) is 1.15× higher than trailing-edge stress (1,948.7 Pa), capturing the physical nose-dive pitch.
WebCAE combines conformal HEX8 + TET4 hybrid meshing with implicit finite-kinematics Coulomb friction, enabling railway engineers to predict stopping distance, pad wear asymmetry, and nose-dive pitch stability.
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