Determination of Steady-State Adhesive Wear Rate

Abstract

A new equation has been formulated and found successful for modeling the wear rate of test specimens. It is capable of predicting the standard steady-state wear rate and the net steady-state wear rate with a FA value, an exponential function, of 0.99 and 0.999, respectively; and with deviations of about 19% and 36%, respectively. A methodology has also been proposed in this paper to enable the steady-state wear rate to be determined more accurately, consistently, and efficiently. The wear test will be divided into three stages: (i) To conduct the transient wear test; (ii) to predict the steady-state wear rate with the required sliding distance based on the transient wear data by using the new equation; (iii) to conduct confirmation runs to obtain the measured steady-state wear rate. The proposed methodology is supported by wear data obtained previously on aluminium based matrix composite materials. It is capable of giving more accurate steady-state wear rates, as well as saving a lot of testing time and labor, by reducing the number of trial runs required to achieve the steady-state wear condition. It will also give more consistent results since a common FA value will be used.