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Critical length scale controls adhesive wear mechanisms

Ramin Aghababaei's picture

The adhesive wear process remains one of the least understood areas of mechanics. While it has long been established that adhesive wear is a direct result of contacting surface
asperities, an agreed upon understanding of how contacting asperities lead to wear debris particle has remained elusive. This has restricted adhesive wear prediction to empirical
models with limited transferability. Here we show that discrepant observations and predictions of two distinct adhesive wear mechanisms can be reconciled into a unified
framework. Using atomistic simulations with model interatomic potentials, we reveal a transition in the asperity wear mechanism when contact junctions fall below a critical length
scale. A simple analytic model is formulated to predict the transition in both the simulation results and experiments. This new understanding may help expand use of computer
modelling to explore adhesive wear processes and to advance physics-based wear laws without empirical coefficients.

 http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160606/ncomms11816/full/ncomms11816.html

 

Simulations reveal two adhesive wear mechanisms, plastic asperity smoothing and fracture-induced debris formation. It has been shown that there exists a critical lengthscale that controls the transition between these two mechanisms.

Here are links to the corresponding movies:

Continual asperity smoothing wear mechanism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuTp6yeBQv8

Fracture-induced wear debris formation mechanism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoqWd633dZc

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