Abstract
The challenges of technical systems subjected to friction and wear become more demanding with steadily increasing stresses. Besides safety matters, failure of tribologically loaded systems can cause tremendous maintenance costs. Because of the lack of a general wear prediction model, tribometer tests must be used in order to investigate wear behaviour of materials in certain tribological systems. Any well-aimed optimizations of tribological contacts requires a comprehensive understanding of friction and wear mechanisms. Otherwise the transferability into technical applications is questionable because of the wide range of applied loads, lubrication conditions, and materials microstructures. In this study, specimens with different topographies and subsurface microstructures were investigated prior to and after tribological testing. The analyses of surface and subsurface characteristics were performed by means of complementary high-resolution electron-microscopy techniques. The study attempted to link the findings to the wear behavior in order to gain information about the pathways of dissipation and transformation of frictional energy into wear. It was found that the dissipation pathways of base body and counter body were different, resulting in diverse tribological behaviour. Nonetheless, the presence of a near-surface grain-refined layers (tribomaterial) supported by a sub-surface strain gradient appears to provide a beneficial influence. Despite the fact that any direct or even conclusive relation to the topographies or subsurface microstructures cannot be given, the discussion provides some hints on how to analyse such systems for their characteristic mechanisms. In addition to the capability of such approach as one step of understanding, its limitations are shown and briefly discussed as well.
Highlights
Friction and wear, their relation and possible transition criteria for acting wear mechanisms have been described on all scales over the last 40 years by many authors, e.g., [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Most importantly it became clear that any tribological property is not just related to a certain material but it is connected to the entire tribological system consisting of base body, counter body, interfacial medium, and environment
We do not know how much frictional energy can be stored as well as the interdependencies of the different pathways based on the loading history by machining and tribological loading
Summary
Their relation and possible transition criteria for acting wear mechanisms have been described on all scales over the last 40 years by many authors, e.g., [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Other results have been reported, e.g., by [11], which demonstrated a relation between energy-based wear rate and the acting wear mechanisms under multidirectional sliding. It was found that approximately 70% was dissipated in heat and the second largest part was represented by material transformation processes [12]. The latter were investigated in parallel but could not be directly related to a certain frictional or wear behaviour [13,14,15,16]
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