Advanced design of brake calipers

This research project is mainly concerned with assessment and optimization of brake caliper design. The caliper belongs to a racing car. It is desirable to discover new patterns in optimized caliper that would aid engineers in their future designs. This is done by creating a FE code written in MATLAB that can assess the displacement and stress of a simplified caliper design, resembling a frame, under a load configuration that is almost identical to the one of the actual caliper. The volume of the caliper and certain displacements have been selected as objective functions. These objective functions are optimized by altering the caliper shape to minimize the mass and maximize the stiffness of the caliper. Following this, the optimal solutions are compared to assist us realizing which design configuration would have the best behavior in terms of defined objective functions. In the end, an asymmetric design is gained that completely matches the results of topology optimization. This fresh design could be further developed and tested for industrial applications.