DESIGN AND FABRICATION OF MOULDING MACHINE FOR LOCAL PRODUCTION OF AUTOMOBILE BRAKE PADS

Automobile brake pads are an important part in brake and clutch devices. The commercial brake pads made from asbestos are found to be carcinogenic. Hence, researchers and brake pads manufacturers have focused more attention on the use of agriculturally base eco-friendly materials such as palm kernel shell (PKS) as the base material to replace the asbestos-made brake pads. This study is currently investigating the use of palm kernel shell (PKS) as base material for the development of automobile brake pads. The research is in two stages which entails fabricating the moulding machine for producing the brake pads, then producing the brake pad using the machine. For the brake pad, the production was done by combining the constituents materials with PKS as based materials at 45% base material, 25% binder and hardener, 15% abrasive, 10% lubricant, 5% filler. Then, the samples were produced using sieve grades of 150 µm particle size and then compressed in the fabricated mould at a pressure of about 15MN/m2 and temperature of 195ºC for adequate compaction. They were then left to dry in an open air for 24 hours. Results of hardness and wear rate tests were used to compare both the commercially available asbestos-based brake pad with the laboratory formulated palm kernel shell-based brake pads in this work. The results showed that the locally produced brake pads exhibited good hardness number of 98.32 BHN and wear rate performance of 3.26 mg/m compared with the commercially available AutoBoss ones of 121 BHN hardness value and wear rate of 3.80 mg/m. Meanwhile, the locally produced pads are both environmentally-friendly and relatively cheap, compared with the ones available in market, thus being potential substitutes and possible replacement to those in markets.