Damage caused by fretting interests many industrial areas. Thus an apparatus has been designed allowing one to study fretting fatigue and fretting wear damage between two hertzian contacting samples submitted to vibrations at high frequency. A closed loop feedback system is used to maintain amplitude and position, thus allowing the machine to have a precise relocation of the stylus and to keep this position during test. Amplitude closed loop system provides either a constant amplitude, displacement, force, acceleration or speed during a test over a wide frequency range. This machine has been successfully applied to both fretting fatigue tests and fretting wear tests. Moreover, the apparatus design allows us to study the effect of the environment on fretting damage. Air, distilled water or liquid nitrogen are the main media to which contacts have been subjected.
