Bradford motoring on automotive brakes research 04 June 2014

The braking research centre at the University of Bradford has recently replaced an old servo motor on one of its test beds with a standard Weg 15kW ac motor intelligently powered by a Weg CFW11 variable speed drive.

The university's Dr David Bryant, fellow for brakes engineering, explains that the centre operates various brake test beds for Bentley and Jaguar Land Rover, and that the new approach saves money and enables a more reliable drive system.

"We needed something that was up-to-date and more reliable. Plus, we needed simple speed control for the motor itself and Weg's ac motors are well suited to this application,"states Bryant.

The state-of-the-art laboratory brings together new and existing specialist research test rigs, including: a Jaguar Land Rover 24kW single wheel quarter-vehicle brake noise rig; a 90kW judder rig; several 7.5kW rigs for wheel brake, vehicle axle and brake noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) research; and a 45kW commercial vehicle brake NVH test rig.

There are also: a light duty disc thickness variation (DTV) test rig; a heavy-duty sample friction tester; and laser holographic interferometry instrumentation, temperature measurement and data logging.

The judder rig installation at the university required a new 90kW motor and drive combination, with a control system, continues Bryant, stating that this, too, was designed, built and commissioned by Westin Drives.

"Westin Drives supplied a safety interlock control system that interfaces with the Weg inverter drive unit so that, if there is a fault, we can shut down the equipment quickly," says Bryant.

"This is incredibly important as, with typical high speed brake testing, we might be running the brake at around 100 miles an hour, and sometimes up to 200 miles an hour. We mostly use the interface from the Weg unit itself to run the motor," he continues.

"There is also an 11kW test rig for Jaguar Land Rover where the motor drive was replaced with a Weg CFW 11 IP54. The control unit on the existing motor had similarly experienced a fault and again we needed something that would do exactly the same job quickly, which is why we opted for a weg unit."

Brian Tinham

Related Companies
WEG Electrical Motors (UK) Ltd

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