Performance of a fully mechanical parking brake system for passenger cars

Abstract

In order to ensure that a vehicle remains stationary when it is parked at a certain road slope, the driver has to apply sufficient pulling force on the handbrake lever. Otherwise, the vehicle will start to rollaway where the torque generated by the parking brake system is lower that the torque required by the vehicle to remain stationary. This poses a danger situation not only to the vehicle's occupants but also to the people surrounding it. Thus, this paper aims to investigate performance of a typical parking brake system used in passenger cars. A theoretical model of drum-type parking brake system is derived and later being validated by test data that measured from the parking brake test bench. A good agreement is achieved between calculated and test results. Results from the model show that the parking brake system used in this work can hold the vehicle stationary at 11 degree slope less than 200 N of the applied force and thus it meets the regulation requirement, and also the vehicle will not rollaway even though there are four adult passengers inside it.