Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Malta, 16-18 July, 2012.
Mechanical systems such as brakes and clutches experience
short periods of intense heating. The heat lost from the exposed
surfaces is small or even negligible compared to the frictional heat
generated during a single engagement. The Biot number for such
systems is known to be very low. The general transient solution is
often obtained by the superposition of a particular solution and the
solution of the corresponding homogenous problem. This paper
presents the finite element realization of this method when the
Biot number is low.