Effects of various fillers on the sliding wear of polymer composites

Short fibre reinforced polymer composites are nowadays used in numerous tribological applications. In spite of this fact, new developments are still under way to explore other fields of application for these materials and to tailor their properties for more extreme loading conditions. The references given at the end of this review describe some of these developments. In the present overview further approaches in designing polymeric composites in order to operate under low friction and low wear against steel counterparts are described. A particular emphasis is focused on special filler (including nanoparticle) reinforced thermoplastics and thermosets. Especially, the influence of particle size and filler contents on the wear performance is summarised. In some of the cases, an integration of traditional fillers with inorganic nanoparticles is introduced and presents an optimal effect. Furthermore, some new steps towards the development of functionally graded tribo-materials are illustrated. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.