A numerical method to investigate the effect of thermal and plastic behaviors on the evolution of sliding wear

Thermo-mechanical wear widely exists in various mechanical components. This paper improves the elastic finite element wear method to solve sliding wear problems with friction heat and elastoplastic behaviors. Especially, the thermo-mechanical wear method is illustrated in details, and the wear problems with full coupled thermal and plastic behaviors are numerically simulated for the first time based on the integration of power hardening law with Archard wear model. The local contact parameters are applied to solve the change of surface geometry and wear profiles based on the proposed wear model. After validation in ball-on-flat experiments, the comparing analysis indicate that friction heat and plasticity have great influence on wear evolution, the proposed method is more accurate than the elastic simulation method. The wear profiles, contact pressure, and temperature can be predicted effectively to help the designer further understand the wear process.