A Fracture Mechanics Approach to Wear Mechanism of Ceramics Under Non-conformal Rolling Friction

Ceramics materials have some useful tribological properties. Therefore, they are used in a variety of industrial fields, which strongly require the severity of operating condition and higher reliability of tribosystem. In this paper, silicon nitride, silicon carbide, cermet, titania and alumina were tested under rolling friction to evaluate wear rate and clarify wear mechanism of ceramic materials based on fracture mechanics. From the experimental result, a wear model of ceramic materials was proposed and analyzed using linear elastic fracture mechanics. Finally, the new non-dimensional parameter, Sc, for the estimation of the ceramic wear rate was introduced and a wear equation was obtained.