A Finite Element Based Technique for Simulating Sliding Wear

Micro-machines are known to fail prematurely due to excessive wear by virtue of their inherent high operating frequencies and high surface to volume ratio. In order to predict wear and eventually the life-span of such complex systems, several hundreds of thousand operating cycles have to be simulated. Due to the complexity of wear, the existing wear models are insufficient to reliably predict wear based on the material properties and the contact information. As a first step, a technique has been developed which involves post processing of the results from a finite element (FE) contact simulation with a simple wear model to compute wear. The technique can be used to simulate wear in a pin-on-disc set-up in order to improve and verify the wear models.