Analysis of air flow and heat dissipation from a high performance GT car front brake

Within this paper the convective heat dissipation from the front brake discs fitted to the left and right hand side of a high performance passenger car has been compared. The tools used in this investigation include computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and vehicle testing. The results show that although identical discs are fitted to both sides of the vehicle the disc fitted to the left hand side shows better thermo-aerodynamic properties than that fitted to the right due to the different direction of rotation. The computational model shows strong agreement with the test results; over predicting the average heat transfer coefficient by 4% for the left hand disc and 7.6% for the right disc. The CFD analysis enabled a detailed insight into the air flow and heat transfer distributions that was not possible during the vehicle test regime.