It may be concluded that much is in the pipeline, but the through the lubricant additives.
ditives. The original work'in this
designer will have to wait a few more years before he can
confidently further increase his component loading at the
design stage. However, on looking back over the last 10
years, such improvements as have come about in rolling
fatigue lives are by no means insignificant. The wide scatter
experienced does, nevertheless, remain an embarrassment.
P.B. Macpherson
Fretting
The effort put into the prevention of fretting during the
last ten years is, by comparison with pitting, relatively
small. Steady progress has, however, been made in funda-
mental studies to improve our understanding of the mecha-
nisms involved. Although nothing of a startling nature has
been revealed it can be claimed that we are now in a
stronger position to decide how best to alleviate fretting
problems.
Although fretting damage can lead directly to the failure of
a component by excessive wear or, through the introduc-
tion of stress raisers, fatigue failure, possibly its most
unwanted feature in machinery is the generation of debris.
Such debris is frequently found to be a main cause of early
failure in rolling element bearings and, to a less extent, gear
tooth flanks. Typically, in a clamped assembly only a very
minor degree of fretting between contacting surfaces can
lead to a reduction in clamping forces. This results from a
dimensional change and, hence, a reduction in torque.
This, in turn rapidly leads to a gross wear situation and the
generation of much debris. Gear assemblies tend to suffer
in this manner.
Basically, designers can combat fretting in two ways: by
preventing the slippage between contacting faces or by pre-
venting the oxidation of the products of fretting. Current
practice is often to minimise the number of joints, ie
potential fretting sites, in new designs. For example, by
making the inner ring of a rolling element bearing an
intergral part of a gear shank, a potential fretting situation
is eliminated. From an overall viewpoint there are,
however, several reasons why the practice is far from ideal,
and is not by any means universally adopted. As is so often
the case in engineering, the elimination of one problem
introduces another. The complete elimination of fretting
wear in an assembly can lead to an increase in torsional
vibration simply because Coulomb friction accounts for
much of the damping, and fretting wear normally increases
the coefficient of friction. This, in turn, tends to introduce
fatigue problems.
Various surface coatings have, for many years, been applied
to eleviate fretting situations. With the development of
plastics many of these have been investigated and, during
recent years, some encouraging results have been obtained.
In particular, the introduction of plastic female splines
have, in general, been found to be effective. Ceramics
do not appear to have met with much success, whereas the
old favourites, copper and silver, are still frequently to be
found.
A means of tackling the prevention of oxidisation has
provided the one novel advance which is showing definite
promise for lubricated contacts. Here the approach is
6 TRIBOLOGY international February 1978
field was carried out in the USA and extended more
recently in the UK. The prevention of lubricated spline
wear has been the immediate objective and this has been
successfully met in the laboratory. The basic concept
results from the finding that high ox3~gen,concentration in
the oil leads to high fretting rates: thus, in all relevant
studies, it is essential that the oxygen content of the oil be
monitored. By inference, peroxy radicals provide the key
to fretting rate and hence the importance of the part
played by anti-oxidants. The actual wear mechanism is, as
usual, abrasive caused mainly by the peroxy radical
oxidised surface and debris. The engineer is normally
unable to interfere with the finely balanced additive
package in a formulated oil and so it is in the hands of the
lubricant blenders to produce satisfactory anti-fretting oils.
Probably the only practical step the engineer can take is to
minimise the amount of air being circulated in the oil.
Present work does suggest that fretting wear in oil
lubricated splines could well be relegated to a problem of
the past.
Progress has certainly been made on a broad front in the
last ten years in overcoming fretting problems. In many
cases potential fretting situations can be designed out and,
possibly, the biggest advance made is simply that the
designers have become more conscious of the problem
and what steps can be taken effectively to counter it.
P.B. Macpherson
Scuffing
Scuffing, defined 2 as 'gross damage characterised by the
formation of local welds between the sliding surfaces', is
not often encountered in service. It influences, however,
the design and metallurgy of many machine components 3 ,
including gears, cams and tappets, and piston rings and
cylinders.
Considerable effort has been devoted over the last ten years
to the study of scuffing phenomena. Perhaps the most
important change during this period has been the develop-
ment of methods for studying surface topography and the
realisation of its significance. Berthe and his co-workers at
INSA have shown the value of following changes in surface
topography during wear tests. Another valuable contri-
bution has been the development of physical techniques to
study surface composition 4. Many of the techniques now
available enable one to study the composition of the actual
surface, rather than of an average of many layers.
Ku et al at the South West Research Institute have carried
out an extensive programme of tests on disc machines. For
example, the data he presented at the 4th Leeds-Lyon
Symposium represent the results of over 500 separate
experiments s. The work has demonstrated the variability
of results and the importance of statistical treatment of
experimental results. It has also shown that the Blok
critical constant temperature model is a good engineering
approximation for a given oil-metal-surface
treatment-atmosphere combination, at least for contacts
with fairly low slide-roll ratios such as simple gears.
P.B. McPherson, hnperial College of Science and Technology, London
SW7 2BX, UK
Results from the disc machine suggest that it simulates
gear contacts reasonably well.
Work by the OECD research group on scuffing has
also produced some interesting results: they have studied
scuffing in 4-ball and spherical pin-on-disc machines.
They suggest a two stage approach: breakdown of the
elastohydrodynamic film followed by breakdown of
boundary lubrication. Dyson, however, has suggested that
these transitions can, in fact, overlap and may even occur
in reverse order under certain conditions.
If the Blok postulate is accepted, an obvious move is to
compare the constant total contact temperature at scurf'rag
with the temperature for the breakdown of boundary
lubrication. Several workers have attempted the compari-
sion, but study of the literature indicates that no strong
correlation has yet been found. Hirst and Hollander 6 have
provided some interesting data on the relationship between
surface topography and boundary lubrication breakdown:
the relevance of this work to scuffing, however, is not yet
clear.
Scuffing is a field where research appears to be following
practice. Fundamental work is still required to give
empiricists some background on which to work: much of
the future experimental work should be oriented to follow-
ing changes in surface topography during tests.
Delamination theory of wear
The delamination theory of wear, introducted in 19737 to
explain the nature of sliding wear, departs completely from
the classical adhesion theory. Extensive analytical and
experimental work s has confirmed the validity of the
theory and many of the postulated mechanisms involved.
It has been demonstrated that rubbing wear particles appear
as thin flakes of metal with highly polished surfaces and not
as the hemispherical fragments generally proposed by
adhesion theory.
The delamination theory of wear is based on the
behaviour of dislocations at the surface, sub-surface void
and crack formation, and the subsequent joining of cracks
by shear deformation of the surface. It predicts that the
wear particle shape is likely to be thin flake-like sheets and
that the surface layer can undergo considerable plastic
deformation. It has been shown that bulk material hard-
ness in itself is not the controlling factor in wear and that
the delamination theory and not the adhesion theory
satisfies the thermodynamic requirements of the frictional
and wear behaviour of metals. The ultimate formation of
the wear particle depends on two mechanisms, void
formation and crack propagation. For materials such as
medium tensile strength steels of good fracture toughness
where void nucleation can readily occur, crack propagation
may be the controlling mechanism. However, for materials
of high tensile strength and low fracture toughness, void
nucleation can be difficult but crack propagation can
readily take place: void nucleation may then become the
controlling mechanism.
Surface examination in conjunction with wear particle
analysis has led to the hypothesis 9 that the interaction of
surfaces in relative motion polishes the surfaces and creates
a shear mix layer of short crystalline order of almost
superductile material which spreads over the surface, as
first proposed by Beilby I 0. Repeated rubbing causes the
shear mix layer to become fatigued and 'Beilby' type
particles flake off.
The experimental and analytical work to date and the pre-
ponderance of plate-like rubbing wear particles produced
under lubricated sliding wear of metals and other plastically
deforming solids provides evidence of a mechanism such as
that postulated in the delamination theory. Further work
needs to be done to provide a more complete description of
the surface behaviour of materials and the wider application
of the delamination theory of wear must await this
additional evidence. It may then be possible to predict the
wear rate of materials based on first principles and funda-
mental material properties.
Advances in understanding emerge principally through the
willingness to question what is generally accepted when
logical deductions based on a theory do not coincide with
reality. It is to be hoped that the postulation of the dela-
mination theory of wear has fostered the questioning spirit.
D. Scott
Wear resistant surface coati=~gs
Surface coatings to increase wear resistance andprolong the
useful life of components and production plant have been
subject to mixed fortune in the last ten years. Materials
conservation fervour has produced few tangible results, but
anti-pollution legislation has been successfully satisfied by
cleaner processes. Some processes such as metalliding have
failed to become commercially significant, while others such
as chemical vapour deposition are now well established.
Thermally-deposited and diffusion coatings, already
established ten years ago, continue to be the major
engineering surface treatments. The flame spraying of
nickel aluminides is a significant development. Plasma and
detonation guns have produced higher quality coatings, and
the arc gun, bridging the gap between flame spraying and
plasma gun, offers fast deposition of different materials to
closely controlled compositions. Unless subsequent fusing
operations are permissible, porosity remains a problem with
thermally deposited coatings where corrosion, as well as
wear, resistance is required.
The lower temperature (570°C) salt bath treatments have
successfully overcome environmentalists' objections to
cyanide waste by process modifications which produce
more easily disposable cyanates for both nitriding and
sulphurising treatments. The trend towards even lower
temperatures, with attendant energy savings but more
importantly lower distortion, is illustrated by the com-
mercial exploitation of Sulf BT and ion-nitriding. Boriding
by salt bath methods has been slow to find applications.
Metalliding has almost disappeared due, no doubt, to the
inherent safety hazards. An interesting newcomer to the
field is manganising, and, despite the handicap of a pro-
cessing temperature in excess of 1000°C, is creating interest
in a wide range of industries.
D. Scott, Paisley College o f Technology, High Street, Paisley,
PAl 2BE, UK
TRIBOLOGY international February 1978 7