Numerical and Experimental Studies of the Attenuation Characteristics of Friction Torque in a Wet Multidisc Clutch

Abstract

A numerical model is proposed to calculate both the contact pressure and the friction torque (FT) of the friction components considering the spline friction in a wet multidisc clutch, which is verified by the bench test. The results indicate that the spline friction of components is an important factor causing the axial attenuation of contact pressure on friction pairs. As the applied pressure increases, the attenuation amplitude of contact pressure increases gradually. In addition, the average single-pair FT decreases with the increasing number of friction pairs, thus leading to the decrease of the growth rate of total FT. Therefore, when the number of friction pairs reaches a certain number, it is not reliable to obtain a good torque enhancement, indicating that the effect of spline friction needs to be weakened to reduce the attenuation of contact pressure.