The Scuffing Behavior of Ground Steel Disks Running Against Superfinished Disks at a High Sliding Speed Available to Purchase

Scuffing experiments were carried out using hardened steel disks lubricated with a gas turbine engine oil under severe conditions of load and sliding. In each experiment using a pair of disks one of the disks was axially ground with a surface finish of approximately 0.4 μm, Ra and the counter-face disk was superfinished to an Ra value of less than 0.1 μm. The disks were gear-connected with a ratio of 4.24 and the sliding speed between the disks was 16 m/s. Scuffing was provoked by increasing the load between the disks in steps corresponding to Hertzian contact pressure increments of 0.1 GPa. It was found that when the superfinished disk was the slower of the two surfaces the load which could be sustained without scuffing was considerably higher than that in the case in which the ground disk was the slower of the pair. This difference in performance may be due to the different frictional heating and micro-elastohydrodynamic behavior at asperity contacts.