

| Subject: | Cryogenic cycling and other such things |
| From: | Pensioner |
| Date: | Sat, 9 Sep 2006 20:37:18 -0700 |
So if I get the drift of this cryo-doodad stuff they say their brakes LAST longer. Do they stop better? On a 5000lb truck? No data yet. But the fizzix says that a particular deceleration requires a particular amount of kinetic energy to be dissipated by the brakes in the form of heat. Some materials are better at doing this and likely over the years the industrial trucking industry who has a pressing commercial need to have the very best brakes for mountain driving with large loads has pretty much sorted out the technology. A disk brake just doesn't cut it on a 50000lb truck. However on a UJM ricerocket they look kewl. The big boys use massive drums and often water cooling. Neither of these are vanagons. Our application is best suited by cast iron rotors (great heat dissipation and conduction) and medium duty pads. Soft pads that wear out in 25Kmi are much preferred to those that last 50Kmi but don't stop very well. Bodywork is much more expensive than brakework. Severe temperature cycling can change the crystalline structure somewhat but does that improve the braking aspect? No data. Stainless disks don't rust but they also don't provide much braking force because they don't dissipate heat as well as cast iron. Aluminum is great for heat transfer but lacks the wear resistance necessary for a vanagon application. The vented disk dissipates heat from inside the braking disk via the vents and provide more heat dissipation capability. Better than the solid disk much better than a stainless disk. In the bicycle world some years ago there was a fad to have anodized rims. The anodization process produces a really kewl looking black rim that doesn't stop as well as plain aluminum because the surface treatment doesn't conduct the heat through the surface as well as un treated aluminum. MA-2 vs MA-40 by Mavic. In the absence of real data of which I have none, the Cryo-treatment smells suspiciously like snake oil (in a vanagon application sort of way). Fizzix and materials science (more fizzix). You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game -- Thermodynamics for the common man.
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