Abstract
Solid friction is considered by some to be a fundamental property of two contacting materials, while others consider it to be a property of the larger tribosystem in which the materials are contained. A set of sliding friction experiments were designed to investigate the hypothesis that the unlubricated sliding friction between two materials is indeed a tribosystems-related property and that the degree to which the materials or the machine and its environment will affect the measured friction is also system-dependent. Three tribometers were used: a friction microprobe (FMP), a typical laboratory-scale reciprocating pin-on-flat device, and a heavier, commercial wear tester. The slider material was stainless steel (AISI 440C) and the flat specimen material was an ordered alloy of Ni3A1 (IC-50). A sphere-on-flat geometry was used at ambient conditions and at normal forces ranging from 0.01 N to 100 N and average sliding velocities of 0.01 to 100.0 mm/s. The nominal, steady-state sliding friction coefficient tended to decrease with increases in normal force for each of the three tribometers, and the steady state value of sliding friction tended to increase as the size of the machine increased. The mechanisms for this behavior concern the relative role of oxide layers, roughness generation, and debris particle-trapping. The variation of the friction force during sliding was a characteristic of the stiffness of the test system. These studies support the idea that the frictional behavior of both laboratory and engineering tribosystems should be characterized by more than a single numerical value for friction coefficient at steady-state and that friction models should predict variations in frictional behavior more explicitly by considering system properties. Mechanistically, the present results underscore how the competition between frictional contributions can change under different testing conditions.
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Blau, P.J. (1992). Scale Effects in Sliding Friction: An Experimental Study. In: Singer, I.L., Pollock, H.M. (eds) Fundamentals of Friction: Macroscopic and Microscopic Processes. NATO ASI Series, vol 220. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2811-7_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2811-7_26
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