The Influence of Antifriction Fillers on the Mechanical and Thermal Characteristics of Metal Polymer Tribosystems

Abstract

In order to study the effect of antifriction fillers on the mechanical and thermal characteristics of composite materials, the theory of efficient modules was applied. In the given chapter, this approach is used to calculate the thermo-elastic moduli and coefficients of thermal conductivity of the two-phase composite material with a matrix based on aliphatic polyamide-6 and with different percentages of filler as rayon-based carbon fiber. The package ANSYS is used as a tool to simulate the composite representative volume and the finite-element analysis of its effective thermo-elastic properties. The two-phase composite with randomly placed dispersed inclusions was considered in the chapter as well. The simple random method of a representative volume generating was applied to obtain the structure of such a composite . The calculation of effective characteristics was carried out at the various parameters of the filler fraction, which ranges from 5 to 40 % in increments of 5 %. The obtained data showed that the values of the density, elastic modulus, Poisson’s ratio, coefficient of linear thermal expansion and the thermal conductivity increases with the increasing of filler concentration. To confirm the obtained results, the experimental investigations were conducted to determine elastic modulus in NanoTest 600, the setup for definition of physical and mechanical characteristics in submicron and nano-volumes. The gotten as an experiment result the modulus was compared with the corresponding calculated value. Errors of results do not exceed 3 %. In order to assess the filler effect on the friction processes the test problem of rectangular composite stamp sliding on steel bars was considered. The model of this contact interaction was implemented in ANSYS. The results indicate that when the stamp has the properties of PA6, the heating temperature is much higher than the using UPA6-30 values. Based on these data, we can make preliminary conclusion that the addition of RCF into PA6 leads to the improvement of its thermal characteristics.