Contact modelling of highly heterogeneous friction material for braking applications

Friction brakes are increasingly undergoing considerable development to improve their durability, efficiency, maintenance costs and environmental impact. Nevertheless, to achieve this, it is necessary to understand the different mechanisms involved in contact that are multi-scale and multi-physical in nature. On the multi-scale aspect, it is well known experimentally that heterogeneities have a pre-weighted role on performance without being able to explain it. Thus, modelling seems to be a good way to better understand the influence of these heterogeneities, provided that we have a multi-scale method to consider them. The objective of this article is therefore to propose a methodology for simulating contact in the presence of heterogeneous materials. The strategy consists in enriching the contact rigidity in terms of behaviour by a method of numerical homogenization. The significant advance of this article lies in the consideration of contact within the technique of numerical homogenization of a heterogeneous material. The strategy is then validated by comparing the mechanical fields between the proposed method and an explicitly meshed case. One of the main contributions of this work is the reduction in computing time compared to the traditional FEM method.