Paul Danny Anandan B.E
Medway School Of Engineering, University Of Greenwich
PREVIOUS TRACK RECORD AND PROJECT BACKGROUND
INTRODUCTION
Since 1918 the revolution in brake technology has started from the invention of four-wheel hydraulic brake systems by Malcolm Loughead. The hydraulic brakes have replaced mechanical brakes which were in use at that time. The mechanical brakes had several disadvantages. It had a difficulty to brake all the wheels equally at the same time. Hydraulic brake requires the driver to give tremendous force on the brake pedal to slowdown the car. In 1918 It's disadvantages were quickly caught and rectified by 1929, four wheel hydraulic brakes were the standard brakes on the higher priced cars. It took many years to be implemented in the lower price cars. As the speed of the vehicles and their weight increased, better brakes were needed. The major problem in drum brakes is that the heat is not efficiently exhausted. The heat which is produced inside the drum cannot escape because the drum makes a cover so that the wind could not take it away. Whereas disc brakes were kept open to the wind passing. Since 1950's the effort on pedal pressure to operate has been reduced due to the reason that the self-servo effect is caused by the motion of the car. This motion helps in pulling the brake shoe to touch the drum which helps to lower the pedal pressure. In early 1950's the disk brakes were introduced in the market with higher price. In later 1950's, after Chrysler developed the disc brake with assisted movement in the piston inside the master cylinder by which the driver can apply less pedal pressure to have greater braking effectiveness. The next recent development in braking systems was the anti-lock or anti-skid braking. Today, anti-lock brakes were commonly installed many new cars.
Brakes stop the rotating wheel and not the car so without wheels it is impossible to stop a car. Even if