Contact mechanics; Adhesion; Friction; Tribology; Wear; Surface Cracking

The eigenfunction method pioneered by Galin (J Appl Math Mech 40: 981–986, 1976) is extended to provide a general solution to the transient evolution of contact pressure and wear of two sliding elastic half-planes, under the assumption that there is full contact and that the Archard–Reye wear law applies. The governing equations are first developed for sinusoidal profiles with exponential growth rates.

There is ample evidence of ThermoElastic Instabilities (TEI) occurring in sliding contacts. The very first experiments of JR Barber in 1969 suggested wear interacts in the process of localization of contact into ”hot spots”. However, studies on the interaction of TEI with wear are scarce. We consider the case of two sliding halfspaces and make a perturbation analysis permitting the formation of waves migrating over the two bodies, in presence of wear. We find that for exactly identical bodies wear does not affect the stability boundary.

I hope this work be of interest to some of you, in particular, those in the field of tribology, contact and damage mechanics. We examined the opposite contribution of interfacial adhesion into the process of surface material removal during adhesive wear. https://journals.aps.org/prmaterials/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.3.063604