Expressing wear rate in sliding contacts based on dissipated energy

The wear of materials in sliding contacts is considered as resulting from an energy dissipation due to friction between the contacting first bodies. Up to now, no standard procedure in tribology is available to relate that dissipated energy with wear losses for different sliding wear tests and conditions. In this paper, a procedure is proposed to correlate the volumetric wear loss of one first body with the dissipated energy for unidirectional and bidirectional ball-on-flat tests. The model can be useful to predict the service lifetime of components from a limited number of laboratory tests. The validity and limitation of the wear loss versus dissipated energy model is illustrated for hard coatings like TiN and (Ti, Al)N, and multilayered (Ti, Al)N/TiN coatings. The effect of the applied normal load and the relative humidity (RH) of the ambient air on the wear rate for these different coatings are shown as well. A mild oxidational wear model is used to describe the material loss on these coatings in sliding contacts. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.