Analytical and Experimental Investigation of the Phenomenon of Self-Locking of Brakes

The phenomenon of self-locking is encountered in mechanical brakes. When a bake is self-locking, the friction torque tries to lock the brake drum completely; entirely on its own. In this paper, an attempt is made to investigate the phenomenon of self-locking, mathematically. An attempt is next made to verify the analytical development, through an experiment. Both the analytical and the experiment investigations agreed closely in the basic aspect that the braking torque grows very rapidly with time. The analytical development predicted that the braking torque grows as an exponential function of time. But the experimental investigation showed that the growth of braking torque is an exponential function of a power of time, indicating that the torque grows much faster.