Proceedings of WTC2005:

World Tribology Congress III

September 12-16, 2005, Washington, D.C., USA

WTC2005-63196
A FINITE ELEMENT BASED TECHNIQUE tolerances and the surface quality, which is another reason for
FOR SIMULATING SLIDING WEAR the importance of a simulation tool that could predict the
influence of the production process and its achievable
1 2 1, 2 tolerances on the lifetime of a micro-machine. The Wear-
V. Hegadekatte* , N. Huber , O. Kraft
1
Processor can be used to develop a wear model and
Institut für Zuverlässigkeit von Bauteilen und subsequently identify the included parameters by simulating
Systemen, Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Kaiserstr. 12, micro-tribological experiments conducted within the parameter
D-76131, Karlsruhe, Germany. space of a certain micro-machine. With the wear simulation
2
Institut für Materialforschung II, tool to be discussed in this chapter, we attempt to close the gap
Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe GmbH, Postfach between in-situ wear measurements, standard tribological
3640, D-76021, Karlsruhe, Germany. experiments and the actual operation of the micro-machine [1].
*Presenting Author
1. Operation of the Wear Processor
Vishwanath.Hegadekatte@imf.fzk.de The wear simulation tool, henceforth known as the Wear-
Processor is shown in Figure 1.1. The entire processes inside
the dashed line represent the Wear-Processor. The contact
ABSTRACT geometry is explicitly modeled and appropriate material and
Micro-machines are known to fail prematurely due to
excessive wear by virtue of their inherent high operating •Geometry
•Geometry Re-meshing
Re-meshing
•Wear
•Wear Depth
Depth as
as Boundary
Boundary Condition
frequencies and high surface to volume ratio. In order to predict
•Contact
•Contact Definition
Definition FEM
FEM Simulation
Simulation Condition
•Material
•Material Model
Model ABAQUS
ABAQUS •Linear
•Linear FE
FE Simulation
Simulation
•Boundary
•Boundary Condition
Condition •Extract
•Extract Node
Node Co-Ordinates
Co-Ordinates
wear and eventually the life-span of such complex systems, Interface
Interface -- Read
Read Result
Result
several hundreds of thousand operating cycles have to be (FE-Post)
(FE-Post)

simulated. Due to the complexity of wear, the existing wear •Inward

Wear-Processor
•Inward Surface
Surface Normal
models are insufficient to reliably predict wear based on the
Normal
•Surface
•Surface Normal
Normal Pressure
Pressure
(Contact
(Contact Pressure)
Pressure)
material properties and the contact information. As a first step,
a technique has been developed which involves post processing utotal = uelastic + uwear Local
Local Wear
Wear Model
Model
(Archard’s
(Archard’s Law)
Law) NO
•Wear
•Wear Depth
Depth
of the results from a finite element (FE) contact simulation with •Wear-Progress
•Wear-Progress Direction
Direction

a simple wear model to compute wear. The technique can be Interface

Interface –– Post
Post Wear
Wear NO
Wear
Wear Depth
Depth
³³ d×Surface-
d×Surface- YES

used to simulate wear in a pin-on-disc set-up in order to Result

Result
(Wear-Post)
(Wear-Post)
ss ³³ ssmax
max
Element
Element Height
(of
(of the
Height
the current
current

improve and verify the wear models.

step)
step)

YES

KEYWORDS: Wear, Wear Modelling, Wear Simulation, Pin- Viewing

Viewing the
the
Wear-Progress
Wear-Progress END
END
on-Disc, Micro-machines
in
in PATRAN
PATRAN

INTRODUCTION Figure 1.1: Flow chart of the Wear-Processor.

Wear is one of the major reliability issues of micro-
machines. Commonly used experimental methods, like Pin-on-
Disc, Scratch test or Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) are not
sufficient for a quantitative prediction of the progress of wear
and eventually the life span of micro-machines. The strategy
discussed in this paper makes use of a simple existing wear
model, which is implemented within a FE based wear
simulation tool. This technique allows for simulating pin-on-
disc wear experiments with the goal to achieve a better
understanding of the phenomena of the wear process. The
approach applies both to the macro- and especially to the
micro-scales. However, of special interest to the micro-scale
applications is that the high contact pressures and sliding
velocities encountered in micro-machines would result in high
amount of wear in the relevant micro-tribological experiments.
There exists hardly any possibility to improve the finishing of
complex shaped micro parts, e.g. micro-gears, for adjusting the
friction properties are assigned. Also the appropriate boundary
conditions are applied on the interacting bodies. The simulation
of wear begins with the solution of the general contact problem
with finite sliding involving two deformable bodies using the
commercial FE package ABAQUS. The inward surface
normal vector at each of the surface nodes are computed based
on the element topology for the 2D or 3D geometry. A very
detailed discussion on the method for the computation of the
normal in a typical 2D and 3D geometry can be found in [2].
The contact pressure at each of the surface nodes is computed
from the normal vector and the stress tensor averaged at each
surface node. The Wear-Processor implements the Archard’s
wear model to calculate linear wear. The wear model is
implemented on the local scale, i.e., it considers the local
contact pressure and the corresponding sliding distance. Its
discretized form is given by h j = k D p∆s j + h j −1 , where h j

1 Copyright © 2005 by ASME

is the total linear wear up to the jth wear step, h j −1 is the total of the wear curve for the pin is steadily decreasing, owing to
the fact that the contact conforms and so the pressure
linear wear up to the j-1th wear step and∆s j is the increment continuously decreases (running-in).
of sliding distance for the jth (current) wear step, p is the
CONCLUSION
contact pressure at each surface node and k D is the A post processing scheme has been proposed with which
dimensional wear coefficient. wear in 3D contacting geometries can be simulated. The results
from the wear simulation and the experimental observations are
2. Simulation of wear in a pin-on-disc set-up qualitatively in good agreement. Such a simulation tool is the
first step to develop guidelines for material selection and micro-
In principle, because of the generality of this method, wear on machine design. Part of that is to formulate requirements on the
components for any material combination can be simulated as materials and production technology, so that a given life span
(a) can be achieved. The simulation tool determines the loss of
2·RP material at the surface. Our goal is to further develop the tool to
solve 2D transient wear problems, like e.g. in a micro gear.
FEM
y
Model
This will allow to study the continuous change of the
FN
kinematics of micro-machines as well as to obtain a more
realistic stress analysis during their operating life time. Thus,
z the life span can be predicted more accurately both by the
failure due to kinematics and the breakdown due to drastically
tD

risen loads resulting from wear.

x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank the German Research
Wear Foundation (DFG) for funding this work within the scope of a
Track collaborative research center named SFB 499 – Design,
2·RWT
production and quality assurance of molded microparts
constructed from metals and ceramics.
2·RD

(b) REFERENCES
0.0016 [1] V. Hegadekatte, N. Huber, O. Kraft, Chapter 5.4:
0.0014
Linear Wear on Pin Development of a Simulation Tool for Wear in Microsystems
Linear Wear on Disc of the special edition of Micro-Engineering in Metals and
Linear Wear, h [mm]

0.0012
Ceramics (Ed.: H. Baltes, O. Brand, G. K. Fedder, C. Hierold,
0.001
J. G. Korvik and O. Tabata: Advanced Micro and Nano Systems
0.0008 Volume 3), Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, Germany, in press.
0.0006 [2] V. Hegadekatte, N. Huber, O. Kraft, Finite element
0.0004 based simulation of dry sliding wear, Modelling and Simuation
in Materials Science and Engineering, 2005, 13, p. 57 – 75.
0.0002

0
0 50 100 150 200
3
No. of Revolutions *10 [ - ]

Figure 2.1: (a) Model of a spherical loaded pin revolving

over a disc in dry sliding contact. The geometry inside
the dashed line is used for the FE simulation by the
Wear-Processor. (b) Progress of wear.
far as experiments are available. In this section, for a first
demonstration, the Wear-Processor is applied for simulating
wear on a loaded spherical pin sliding over a disc (“pin-on-
disc”) as shown in Figure 2.1(a). The FE model is built using a
very small slice of the pin and the disc in the contact region
from that part of the pin-on-disc, which is within the dashed
circle in Figure 2.1(a).
The progress of wear over the number of revolutions
(proportional to the sliding distance) on the pin and the disc
surfaces is shown in Figure 2.1(b). It can be seen that the slope

2 Copyright © 2005 by ASME