On Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 11:41:08 AM UTC-4, MNLou wrote:
I've been working all year on limiting my ground roll.

I have a LAK17AT that, supposedly, has weak drum brakes. I dispelled that rumor years ago by having full stick back and dropping the nose twice due to hard braking.

I added a 7# brass tailwheel last year which helped both the CG and helped keep the tail on the ground when braking. (Also, helped tail bouncing on early takeoff ground roll.)

I did run into one situation that caused me some angst a few weeks ago. Landed well, stick back, lots of brake. Turned off the runway and hit the brake again. Nope, no joy - big brake fade. I squeezed as hard as I could and stopped with my nose just into the cropland.

Any good ideas on how to limit brake fade? Other than, of course, limit high speed brake use?

Lou
Brake fade is what happens when component temperature passes some critical value. Thus, there are two approaches we can take: (1) change the critical value and (2) keep temperatures lower.

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Addressing (1) can only be done through material changes. Different material brake pads have different heat characteristics. Some can handle twice the temperature before overheating. However, there seems to be an inverse relationship between fade temperature and braking effectiveness. You also want to make sure increased temperatures don't lead to nasty unintended-consequences, such as melting rubber sidewalls.

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Compensating for (2) is a matter of thermal mass. There are many ways to add thermal mass. You can very easily calculate an upper limit on how much thermal dissipation you need by taking your worst case touchdown speed and your MTOM, and then calculating your kinetic energy (1/2 m *v^2). This heat needs to be absorbed by the braking system. There are two easy ways to reduce temperatures while absorbing this fixed quantity of kinetic energy-- heat transfer to the air and temperature increase. There's also an interesting way which we won't go into here except to say that it'd be amazingly effective if you could figure out the engineering and that's phase change materials (e.g. boiling water or meltingÂ*paraffin wax).

Dissipating energy to the environment is hard, there just isn't enough time or ventilation. However, for a limit case-- which it sounds like you have-- you could maybe just nudge things over the line by using a fan which blows on the drum. Depending on a number of factors, this could increase heat transfer effectiveness by an order of magnitude, which could be enough to buy you a few more seconds of braking. Easy enough to test, get a car to tow you down the runway, release, and then brake hard.

However, in a more general sense-- and ignoring the prior comment about phase change materials-- the only option we've got is increased thermal mass. Steel is easy because the brake drum is already made of it, but it has pretty poor specific heat capacity at around 0.5 kJ/kgC. Aluminum is almost twice better at 0.9kJ/kgC. You've just got to figure out how to thermally couple the aluminum to your steel drum. It's not hard, but it's not as easy as wrapping some old aluminum foil around the drum and calling it a day.Â*

One outside possibility is that If your wheel is aluminum, you *might* even be able to use a thermally conductive pad between the wheel and the drum in order to more quickly transfer heat to the wheel. This has the effect of reducing thermal resistance to a very nice mass of aluminum. With a low enough thermal resistance the wheel can serve as an effective thermal sink.Â*

So it really depends on your appetite for experimentation and budget. Easiest might be different brake pads, if you can find such things.

P.S. One thing we haven't talked about is brake fluid boiling. I don't know if your brake is cable driven or hydraulic, but if it is hydraulic then there is a possibility you experiencedÂ*this instead of pad fade.