Abstract
The adhesive wear process remains one of the least understood areas of mechanics. While it has long been established that adhesive wear is a direct result of contacting surface asperities, an agreed upon understanding of how contacting asperities lead to wear debris particle has remained elusive. This has restricted adhesive wear prediction to empirical models with limited transferability. Here we show that discrepant observations and predictions of two distinct adhesive wear mechanisms can be reconciled into a unified framework. Using atomistic simulations with model interatomic potentials, we reveal a transition in the asperity wear mechanism when contact junctions fall below a critical length scale. A simple analytic model is formulated to predict the transition in both the simulation results and experiments. This new understanding may help expand use of computer modelling to explore adhesive wear processes and to advance physics-based wear laws without empirical coefficients.
Highlights
The adhesive wear process remains one of the least understood areas of mechanics
The model assumed that those plastically deformed surface asperities are worn away gradually by the removal of atoms as the two surfaces slide. This mechanism has since been observed in atomic force microscopy (AFM) experiments[4,5,6,7,8,9] and predicted by atomistic simulations[10,11,12]
We hypothesize that changing the material properties in an atomistic simulation could lead to wear debris formation and a steady-state sliding regime, that is, sustained debris formation
Summary
The adhesive wear process remains one of the least understood areas of mechanics. While it has long been established that adhesive wear is a direct result of contacting surface asperities, an agreed upon understanding of how contacting asperities lead to wear debris particle has remained elusive. Previous atomistic modelling studies of the adhesive wear predict a continual smoothing of surfaces rather than a steady-state wear regime with debris particles[10,11,12,20,21,22,23]; inconsistent with common experimental observations A systematic set of atomistic simulations with these potentials reveals a characteristic length scale that controls the adhesive wear mechanisms at the asperity level This length scale provides a critical adhesive junction size, where bigger junctions produce wear debris by fracture while smaller ones smooth out plastically. On the basis of this observation, we formulate a simple analytical model that predicts the transition in the asperity-level adhesive wear mechanisms in both the simulation results and experiments
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