WEAR STUDIES IN PARTIAL EHL CONTACTS

Abstract

The problem of wear in PEHL is important as, in many cases, it is the gradual wearing of the material that eventually leads to the failure of a component. Work reported in this area is comparatively meagre so far. In view of its major engineering implications, this area is, however, important and the present thesis ' deals with the problem of wear in PEHL contacts. Experiments have been conducted on a disc machine with the aim of studying the wear mechanisms and to model wear to predict it quantitatively, and a reasonable success has been achieved. .Experimental work was carried out on disc machine with EN 31 and mild steel disc combination using mineral oil as lubricant under different slide/roll ratios. Available models have been used to calculate the load sharing between the asperities and the EHL film. Wear has first been treated with the help of conventional boundary lubrication models,. which proved to be unsuccessful. However, the wear rate (in terms of wear factor) showed good correlation with the film thickness ratio and it became possible to express the wear by fairly reliable empirical relatione............