Fretting wear evolution model of the metal filaments inside metal rubber

Abstract

Metal rubber (MR) is a porous material which possesses macroscopic damping properties through the dry friction between the internal helical metal wires. Due to its complex topological structure, the research on the fretting wear of MR is rarely reported in the literature. In the present work, a double-body wear model of metal filaments is constructed by the master-slave composite method. The friction and wear conditions of the dynamic and static metal wires inside the MR are analyzed under different contact angles, loads, and vibration amplitudes. The results indicate that the wear area and volume of the dynamic wire under each working condition are significantly larger than those of the static wire, while the case for the wear depth is the opposite. After wear, the wires exhibit an obvious stress concentration phenomenon, which is distributed along the wire wear contour area, and the wear profile has a high sensitivity to the contact angle. In order to further investigate the difference in the wear degree of the static and dynamic wires inside the MR, the fretting amplitude is introduced to describe the wear scar area of the dynamic wire, the special wear scar area is reorganized regularly, and the wear volume of the wire is approximated by the regional combination, deriving and constructing a fretting wear evolution model suitable for MR wires. This evolution model can simultaneously predict the wear degree of dynamic and static wires, and its prediction accuracy is high. The prediction accuracy under each working condition is basically less than 10%; thus, the proposed model can be effectively applied to the fretting wear prediction of MR ultra-fine wire contact pairs. This work provides theoretical guidance for the life prediction and other aspects of MR materials.