A FRACTURE-INDUCED ADHESIVE WEAR CRITERION AND ITS APPLICATION TO THE SIMULATION OF WEAR PROCESS OF THE POINT CONTACTS UNDER MIXED LUBRICATION CONDITION

Adhesive wear is one of the four major wear mechanisms and very common in almost all macro-, micro- or nanotribosystems. In an adhesive wear process, tiny material fragments are pulled off from one sliding surface and adhered onto the counterpart. Later these fragments form loose particles or transfer between the contact surfaces. Because of the topographical and physicochemical property non-uniformity of engineering surfaces, adhesive wear happens heterogeneously on the loaded sliding surfaces, and it is also discontinuous during sliding or rolling motion owing to the damage accumulation and fracture occurred inside the subsurface layers. Taking account of these characteristics, a novel fracture-induced adhesive wear criterion has been proposed in this study in order to predict local wear of material in sliding. Moreover, the proposed wear criterion is applied to predicting wear particle formation and morphology evolution of mixed lubricated rough surfaces during reciprocating sliding, and the simulation results are compared with the ball-on-disk experimental measurements.