A study of wear in CuFe systems

Abstract

Results of experiments run on a ball-on-disc machine in which one component of the wear test was copper or a Cu-Be alloy while the other component was iron or AISI-SAE 52100 steel are reported in this paper. The experiments were run in air (40% relative humidity) at room temperature and a wide variety of different types of wear were encountered and are described in some detail. Thus six of the eight possible wear systems yield five different types of wear: 1. (i) severe wear of the copper-containing component with metal transfer. 2. (ii) severe wear of the copper-containing component without metal transfer. 3. (iii) mild wear of the copper-containing component without oxide transfer. 4. (iv) mild wear of the iron-containing component with oxide transfer. 5. (v) mild wear of the iron-containing component without oxide transfer. In contrast with these results simple wear systems, tested under similar experimental conditions, show relatively simple wear behaviour. Thus when both components are copper based both components show severe wear (as demonstrated by the present author), and when both components are 52100 steel there is a simple process of mild wear with oxide transfer (as shown by Sexton and Fischer).