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The hydraulic brake products like brake calipers, master cylinders and boosters are the foundation of today complex vehicle brake systems. The state of the art application leads very often to an individual design, due to the fulfillment of customer requirements within the available installation space. Also the enormous pressure on cost and time require optimized design processes. Therefore Continental developed the product configuration software CoBra. Within this software tool, the engineering is able to react very fast on demands. Starting with the brake sizing parameters and the customer interface definition, CoBra supports the design engineer to select the necessary components and positioning them accordingly, considering the actual design standards. The data based configuration software collects all necessary design parameters and provides an export to parametric CAD start up models.

In the research project between the Institute of Automotive Engineering (FZD) of the Technische Universität Darmstadt (TUD) and Continental Teves AG & Co. oHG a new modeling concept has been developed. With the aim to enhance the current development process, the brake caliper is modeled based on coupled rigid bodies integrated into a nonlinear system model. Using an explicit interface definition, the number of degrees of freedom is minimized and the calculation of caliper performance is possible over a wide range of parameters. Compared to models based on the Finite Element Method (FEM), fully parameterized geometry from CAD is not necessary, thus the caliper can be optimized for a variation of its geometrical and physical parameters. With this modeling approach, typical performance criteria such as caliper fluid displacement, hysteresis, uneven pad wear and residual torque can be calculated in a virtual bench test.