Abstract
Frictional heating in brakes causes thermoelastic distortion of the contacting bodies and hence affects the contact pressure distribution. The resulting thermo-mechanical coupling can cause thermoelastic instability (TEI) if the sliding speed is sufficiently high, leading to non-uniform heating called hot spots and low frequency vibration known as hot judder. The vibration of brakes to the known phenomenon of frictionally-excited thermoelastic instability is estimated studying the interface temperature and pressure evolution with time. A simple model has been considered where a layer with half-thickness$\alpha$slides with speed V between two half-planes which are rigid and non-conducting. The advantage of this properlysimple model permits us to deduce analytically the critical conditions for the onset of instability, which is the relation between the critical speed and the growth rate of the interface temperature and pressure. Symmetrical component of pressure and temperature distribution at the layer interfaces can be more unstable than antisymmetrical component. As the thickness $\alpha$ reduces, the system becomes more apt to thermoelastic instability. For perturbations with wave number smaller than the critical$m_{cr}$ the temperature increases with m vice versa for perturbations with wave number larges than $m_{cr}$ , the temperature decreases with m.
