Case Study of Tribological Failure Characteristics in Automotive Steering System

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study and analyze the failure examples on tribological characteristics of an automotive steering system. In this failure study, the grease leakage may stick leaked grease, dust, and wear particles between pinion and rack gears in mechanical steering system. In the case of seal failures such as a rod seal, o-ring and oil seals, the gear box and oil pump do not operate properly due to lack of oils. This means that oil pump does not supply a working fluid and produce a normal oil pressure of the steering system. This leads to leak a working fluid from the seals and produce a wear between pinion and rack gears. Especially, the leaked oil is usually mixed with internal wear particles and foreign dust/fine sands. Thus no leakage of working oils is very important design concepts, which is strongly related to the sealing components and smoothly operating of the mechanical friction parts of power steering system.