Fretting Wear Mechanisms and Their Effects on Fretting Fatigue

Abstract

Fretting wear and fretting fatigue are governed by the rate of formation of materials (third-bodies) between the initial contact surfaces. Furthermore, the third-bodies must be maintained within the contact. The issue of the race between third-body formation and subsurface damage conditions the effect of fretting on fatigue. That race lasts for only a few hundred or at best a few thousand cycles. Effective third-bodies (or good anti-fretting lubricants) must adhere strongly to the rubbing surfaces, and be able to accommodate at least part of the relative displacement. Great care in the design of test equipment has to be exercised before definitive results on the effect of amplitude and frequency on either fretting fatigue or fretting wear can be obtained for a given contact condition, given materials and given environments.

Environmental effects in fretting

“…∑ Contact parameters such as movement amplitude and frequency can strongly modify material behavior (Kennedy et al, 1982;Vingsbo and söderberg, 1988;söderberg et al, 1986;Berthier et al, 1988a). ∑ Corrosion and oxidation of debris are generally consequences of the initial damage and are not the cause of degradation (Waterhouse, 1972;Colombié et al, 1984).…”

Fretting Fatigue Model

“…Initially these cracks may be influenced by the contact force and friction, as concluded by Edwards (23). Also, the team headed by L. Vincent at University of Lyon in France has made extensive progress in assisting the understanding of the transition from initial fretting fatigue damage to propagating crack (26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35). However, none of the effort to date has yielded a functional relationship that allows a determination of the time/cycles for evolution of the initial damage state to a cracked state.…”

“…Significant progress characterizing fretting damage has been made by the University of Lyon group headed by L. Vincent. Building on Vingsbo and Soderberg's work in a technique called 'fretting maps' (61), they have successfully been able to distinguish 'fretting damage modes' that are useful for identifying types of damage that may or may not occur in a fretting situation (27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35) by using measuring certain experimental parameters and constructing two 'maps', running condition fretting maps (RCFM) and material response fretting maps (MRFM), that are well correlated with surface and fretting cracking damage. These maps show that fretting damage can be separated into 3 'fretting modes', depicted on plots of shear stress against nominal displacement amplitude in Figure 4.…”

Dynamic analysis of fretting-wear in friction contact interfaces

“…Apart from Levy (1980), and Sextro (2002), coupling between fretting-wear and vibrations is very seldom taken into account in the literature, due to the complexity it introduces. Nevertheless, certain experimental studies have investigated the effect of frequency on fretting wear (Berthier et al, 1988;Soderberg et al, 1986;Leonard et al, 2009).…”