Recycling of worn out brake pads ‒ impact on tribology and environment

Yezhe Lyu; Jijie Ma; Anna Hedlund Åström; Jens Wahlström; Ulf Olofsson

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-65265-w

Recycling of worn out brake pads ‒ impact on tribology and environment

Sci Rep. 2020 May 20;10(1):8369. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-65265-w.

Authors

Yezhe Lyu¹, Jijie Ma^{2

3}, Anna Hedlund Åström², Jens Wahlström^{2

4}, Ulf Olofsson²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Machine Design, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, SE-10044, Stockholm, Sweden. yezhe@kth.se.
² Department of Machine Design, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, SE-10044, Stockholm, Sweden.
³ College of Engineering, Zhejiang Normal University, 321004, Jinhua, China.
⁴ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Lund University, SE-22100, Lund, Sweden.

Abstract

Disc brake systems are widely used on commercial vehicles for braking. The brake pads are usually replaced by new ones before being totally worn out. Current methods to deal with the replaced brake pads include landfill and combustion, resulting in a huge waste of resources and increase of CO₂ footprint. From a sustainable point of view, this study aims to evaluate the feasibility of recycling replaced brake pads by addressing a protocol recycling procedure. The results show that the recycled brake pads yield similar friction, wear and airborne particle emission to virgin brake pads. A streamlined life cycle assessment is conducted to compare the environmental impacts between producing virgin brake pads and recycling replaced brake pads. Energy consumption and CO₂ footprint of the recycled brake pads are 36% and 34% less than virgin brake pads, indicating that recycling could be a promising method of handling replaced brake pads.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't