A Fracture Based Model for Wear Debris Formation

Abstract

Wear is often of definite influence in the service life of mechanical components and has been recognised as one of the major causes of failure in engineering practice. It is noted that although extensive attention has been paid to phenomenological studies like surface morphology analysis for wear assessment, the physical mechanism of wear particle formation remains unclear. This paper proposes a micro damage and fracture model to simulate the process of wear particle generation. An explicit finite element (FE) formulation is employed to capture the nonlinearities involved. Unlike existing FE analysis (FEA), any initial sub-fractures underlying the wear surface are no longer required. Crack initiation and propagation as well as the corresponding mesh updating are implemented in an automatic fashion associated with the explicit FE framework. The results presented are in good agreement with experimental observation and the reports in existing literature.