Active Brake Judder Compensation Using an Electro-Hydraulic Brake System

Geometric imperfections on brake rotor surface are well-known for causing periodic variations in brake torque during braking. This leads to brake judder, where vibrations are felt in the brake pedal, vehicle floor and/or steering wheel. Existing solutions to address judder often involve multiple phases of component design, extensive testing and improvement of manufacturing procedures, leading to the increase in development cost. To address this issue, active brake torque variation (BTV) compensation has been proposed for an electromechanical brake (EMB). The proposed compensator takes advantage of the EMB's powerful actuator, reasonably rigid transmission unit and high bandwidth tracking performance in achieving judder reduction. In a similar vein, recent advancements in hydraulic system design and control have improved the performance of hydraulic brakes on a par with the EMB, therefore invoking the possibility of incorporating the BTV compensation feature of the EMB within hydraulic brake hardware. In this paper, the typical characteristics of electromechanical and electro-hydraulic brake systems are presented. Based on the experimental results, the feasibility of active BTV compensation on the electro-hydraulic brake (EHB) systems is discussed. Furthermore, a BTV compensation algorithm designed for the EMB is presented and is shown to be applicable to the EHB. Using an experimentally validated model of BTV, the compensation was performed on a hardware in-the-loop EHB test rig. The preliminary results demonstrate the potential of using an EHB to compensate for brake judder.