Heat is an unavoidable product of frictional braking. The high temperature is the biggest bottleneck of performance braking on a budget. There's also a lot of energy lost. Proposed is a thin heat exchanger plate placed on the back of the brake pads (between the pad backing and the wheel cylinder piston). It would likely be made of a copper alloy. Pipes running on either side of the heat exchanger plate would plumb water to a turbine regenerator to recover some of the energy that's lost. The boiling would cool the plate and help improve the performance of the pad under certain conditions.
-- kevinthenerd, Jun 14 2012

The water cooling jacket might have some merit; I doubt there's enough heat that would make the turbine regenerator of any real benefit though, unless youre talking about race cars specifically.

Using electric motors to recapture waste energy is baked in most hybrids and is more efficient than the turbine would be.
-- acurafan07, Jun 14 2012


I like the thin jacket idea. The steam generation...I don't agree that it is of any use. But back to the water cooling behind the pads: The jacket would need to withstand some quite large compressive forces, and also be wafer thin. The water-filled jacket might make the brakes "spongy"?
-- Ling, Jun 14 2012


// The jacket would need to withstand some quite large compressive forces //

Not if the hear exchanger were annular, and the force was taken by the centre pillar and rim of the carrier.

But the pads are refractory ... the place you want to extract the heat is the disc. That's metal, and intrinsically conductive.

Water- cooling the hub would be better.
-- 8th of 7, Jun 14 2012


I agree that the disc is better, but it rotates. The pad is not as refractory as you think, that's why brake fluid can boil.
-- Ling, Jun 14 2012



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