ORIGINAL PAPER Tribological Properties of Short Fiber C/SiC Brake Materials and 30CrSiMoVA Mate Shangwu Fan • Junzhan Zhang • Litong Zhang • Laifei Cheng • Guanglai Tian • Haiping Liu Received: 17 February 2011 / Accepted: 6 June 2011 / Published online: 17 June 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract In this study, the short fiber C/SiC brake materials were prepared by a combined process of the fibers dipped with resin, chopping, warm pressing, pyro- lyzing, and the liquid silicon infiltration process. The tri- bological properties of short fiber C/SiC brake materials and 30CrSiMoVA mate were investigated. The results indicated that the average friction coefficient decreased with the increase of braking speed (initial braking speed), and the friction coefficient tended to be constant when the braking speed was higher than 20 m/s. The braking was stable when the braking speed was 5 m/s, and the braking was unstable when the braking speed was higher than 10 m/s. The wear rate of the C/SiC increased with the increase of braking speed when the braking speed was less than 10 m/s, decreased with the increase of braking speed when the braking speed was less than 20 m/s, and then increased afterward with the increase of braking speed. When the braking speed was higher than 20 m/s, an oxi- dation-abrasion mechanism could occur. With braking speed increasing, the number of the ribbon debris increased, and the ribbon debris got long and thick, and the number of big granular debris increased. Keywords Ceramic composite  Brakes  Tribological properties 1 Introduction C/SiC composites are new type of high performance brake materials developed after the powder metallurgy materials (PM) and C/C composites. The C/SiC composites combined the advantages of PM and C/C brakes, and overcame most of the disadvantages of PM and C/C brakes, which exhib- ited a series of outstanding advantages such as low density, good high temperature resistance, high strength, excellent friction properties, low wear rate, and long life [1–6]. The first development of the C/SiC brake was made by the British Engineers working in the railway industry for TGV applications in 1988. Up to now, the C/SiC brakes have been successfully applied to Porsche, Ferrari, and Daimler Chrysler and the other high-end performance cars [7, 8]. For automobiles, the abrasion resistance of the C/SiC disks guarantees a service life of 300,000 km which is four times greater than that of steel disks [8]. In recent years, plenty of work have been done for development of C/SiC aircraft brake materials [1, 5, 6]. In 2008, the flight test of the C/SiC aircraft brakes was accomplished successfully [9, 10], which is a new milestone of the aircraft braking. For high braking performance, the C/SiC brake materi- als are potential candidates for high speed trains, automo- biles, aircraft, and emergency brakes for elevators and cranes [1, 8, 11]. However, the materials of the braking mate are different for different applications. The research on the tribological performance of the C/SiC brake mate- rials and the metal mate has seldom been reported. PM and 30CrSiMoVA mate were applied widely in the braking systems of rotary-wing aircraft, automobile, train, and early aircraft. In the present study, 30CrSiMoVA were used as the metal mate. The aim of the present study was to investigate the tribological performance of the C/SiC brake materials and the metal mate (30CrSiMoVA). S. Fan (&)  J. Zhang  L. Zhang  L. Cheng  G. Tian  H. Liu National Key Laboratory of Thermostructure Composite Materials, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, Shaanxi, China e-mail: shangwu_fan@nwpu.edu.cn G. Tian Xi’an Aviation Brake Technology Co. Ltd, Xi’an 713106, Shaanxi, China 123 Tribol Lett (2011) 43:287–293 DOI 10.1007/s11249-011-9807-5