The Effect of Interaction Between Neighboring Asperity Contacts on Wear Mode Transition in Sliding Contact of Rough Surfaces

Concerning the final aim, that is to make clear the mechanism of the wear mode transition from mild to severe belong to the increase of contact pressure in adhesive wear, estimation of the yielding condition in subsurface under contact boundary between rough surfaces was attempted in this study. Especially the effects of interaction between neighboring contacts as well as relative sliding on the yielding area were focused. The contacts between asperities were modeled by the contact between two neighboring hard wedges with the parallel axes and soft plane to be simplified. These models were calculated by commercial FEM solver in 2-dimension. Additionally, the effect of the difference between the heights of two wedges on the yielding region was evaluated by comparing the result with that obtained from the simple model of two wedges with the same height in non-sliding contact. The results showed that the effect of the interaction between adjacent contacts and existence of relative slip motion give significant factors to the yielding state, on the other hand, the height difference between neighboring asperities affects little the determination of the yielding region.