A Brief Review of Abrasive Wear Modelling Using a Numerical-Experimental Approach

Abstract

Abrasive wear limits the lifetime of key components and wear parts used in various applications. Damage is caused by indentation of harder particles into the wearing materials and subsequent relative motion resulting in ploughing, cutting, and fracture phenomena. The wear mechanisms depend mainly on the applied materials, loading conditions, and abrasives present in the tribosystem, hence material choice is often a difficult task and requires careful evaluation. For this, a variety of laboratory abrasion tests are available of which the scratch test is discussed in this work as the most fundamental abrasive interaction. For further insight into the acting wear mechanisms and microstructural effects, large-scale molecular dynamics simulations were carried out as well as meso-/macroscopic scratch simulations with the mesh-free Material Point Method. The prediction of abrasive wear is of high relevance for industrial applications. Up to now, no general one-to-one match between field application and lab system is known. Here, a simulation-based transfer of experimentally determined wear rates via a lab-2-field approach enables the prediction of wear rates in real applications.