Influence of relative humidity on wear of self-mated 100Cr6 steel

The influence of relative humidity on friction and wear is subject of several studies in the last decades. A comprehensive understanding of physical and chemical phenomena affecting the tribology is hampered by the lack of reproducible experimental results, by the large number of variables, and by several difficulties in the detection of tribochemical processes and products. In the present work, we analyze the wear coefficient and the wear volumes of 686 unlubricated tests performed on different oscillating tribometers with 100Cr6 balls on 100Cr6 planes at different relative humidity. Aim of this work is to assess the repeatability and reproducibility of data, to determine the dependence of the wear coefficient on the relative humidity, to understand the underlying physicochemical phenomena and to build three dimensional maps of the wear coefficient as a function of both humidity and the product of normal force and sliding distance.