Investigation of three-body abrasive wear systems with hard particles and liquid as intermediate medium using a customized tribometer

Abstract

This article discusses dynamic phenomena and the measurement of forces in short-term tests of tribological three-body abrasive wear systems with hard silicon carbide particles.

Tribometers enable the measurement of forces, whereby analytical methods are used to determine the forces transmitted in the tribological contact zone on the basis of the forces recorded with a dynamometer that is not directly located in the tribological contact zone.

In addition to the theoretical background, this article also deals with a realization of the tribometer, which requires some finely tuned adaptations compared to the ideal tribometer due to tolerances existing in reality.

The data basis for the evaluation is a series of experiments with three-body abrasive wear systems with and without liquid, different particle sizes, particle quantities, loads and speeds.

In contrast to many other publications, the focus is not only on mean values, but also on the relative spread (i.~e.~the standard deviation per mean value) of occurring forces.

In particular, the relative spread shows clear and repeatable trends and thus qualifies as a supporting criterion for the comparison of different force measurements of tribological systems.

Furthermore, an alternative to the established procedure of randomized test execution is presented in order to detect (unintentional) temporal changes in the test conditions.