Estimating the Dry-Wear Behavior of Rolling/Sliding Bearings (PB, Gunmetal, and Al6061)–Tribo Materials.

This study investigates the energy dissipation and application of a simplified incremental wear model to assess its effectiveness in predicting the wear behavior of three specific bearing materials (phosphorus bronze, gunmetal, and aluminum 6061) under dry sliding/rolling conditions. The wear experiments were conducted using twin disk rolling/sliding tribometers at different applied loads of 49, 98, and 147 N, while maintaining a fixed slip ratio of 4%. The wear depth changes were periodically measured over a total sliding distance of 1860 m experimentally as well through simplified wear model in MATLAB®. The wear depths obtained from the experimental data were compared with the wear depths predicted by the incremental wear model for the three selected material pairs: (i) phosphor bronze, (ii) gunmetal, and (iii) aluminum alloy with EN31 as the counterface disk material. The simulated wear depth results showed good qualitative and quantitative agreement with the experimental results, with errors of 6.4, 6.8, and 10.7% for the aluminum disk, gunmetal disk, and phosphor bronze disk, respectively. Overall, the wear model was found to be computationally efficient in estimating the dry wear behavior and service life of chosen bearing tribo pairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]