This paper presents an overview of recent experimental and numerical investigations on industrial railway brakes. The goal of the present study is to discuss the relevance of the mechanical modeling strategy for squeal prediction. Specific experimental set-ups based on transient and controlled braking tests are designed for this purpose. Measurements are performed on it to investigate the dynamic behavior of TGV squeal noise and its squeal characterization through experiments. It will be demonstrated that it is possible to build consistent and efficient finite element models to simulate squeal events in TGV brake systems. The numerical strategy will be presented, including not only the modeling of the TGV brake system and the stability analysis, but also the transient nonlinear dynamic and computational process based on efficient reduced basis. This complete numerical strategy allows us to perform relevance squeal prediction on industrial railway brakes. This study comes within the scope of a research program AcouFren that is supported by ADEME (Agence De l'Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l'Energie) concerning the reduction of the squeal noise generated by high power railway disc brakes.
