A numerical approach that simulates the progressive accumulation of wear in oscillating metal on metal contacts is proposed. The approach uses a reciprocating pin-on-disk tribometer to measure a wear rate for the material pair of interest. This wear rate is an input to a finite element analysis that simulates a block-on-ring experiment. After the simulation, two block-on-ring experiments were performed with the same materials that were studied in the reciprocating pin-on-disk experiments. The results from the finite element analysis were in close agreement with the block-on-ring experimental results. This approach did not either rely on curve fitting or use the block-on-ring experimental data as model inputs. The finite element analyses were performed by progressively changing nodal coordinates to simulate the removal of material that occurs during surface interaction . The continuous wear propagation was discretized and an extrapolation scheme was used to reduce computational costs of this simulation.

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WEAR
vol. 258 (2005) pp. 1787-1793