Fault Detection and Isolation for Brake Rotor Thickness Variation

Brake rotors are critical parts of the disc braking system for modern vehicles. One common failure for brake rotors is the thickness variation, which may result in unpleasant brake pulsation, vehicle vibration during braking, or eventually lead to the malfunction of the braking system. In order to improve customer satisfaction, vehicle serviceability and availability, it is necessary to develop an onboard fault detection and isolation solution. In our previous work, the vibration features of master cylinder pressure, vehicle longitudinal acceleration and wheel speed were identified as fault signatures. Based on these fault signatures, a vibration- based fault detection and isolation algorithm is developed in this work. The difference of frequency response between the braking period and the normal driving period (non-braking) is employed to improve the algorithm robustness. The experiment results demonstrate the proposed algorithm can robustly diagnose the thickness variation fault and isolate the fault to each vehicle corner.