Smart braking material wearout monitoring for part life assessment

In this paper a smart measurement system is designed in order to monitor the thickness changes in a braking material of an electrodynamic structure (brake) exploited in tractors and ships. The same braking material can behave differently depending on different working conditions and often not easy inspection operations are required to monitor thickness changes of about 10-20μm. Safety and reliability implications arises as consequences of undesired wear-out rate. This work aims at the demonstration of the possibility to implement a trustable measurement system for aging effect monitoring of braking surfaces after heavy and variable load operations. A full material characterization has been performed to verify ideal starting conditions matching and maximum endurance of the selected braking material.