Modeling the effectiveness of oil lubrication in reducing both friction and wear in a fretting contact

Abstract Lubrication is often employed in fretting contacts to reduce wear and stresses associated with high friction. Owing to the very small displacements associated with fretting, penetration of lubricating oils into the contact may not be effective. The efficacy of the penetration of the lubricant into the contact is very difficult to observe experimentally, and accordingly, this paper presents a numerical simulation of a lubricated fretting contact using a Coupled–Eulerian–Lagrangian (CEL) finite element method. Meso-scale CEL finite element models are developed to simulate the cylinder-on-flat arrangement used experimentally at the University of Nottingham in which the roughness of contact surfaces is characterized as fractal geometry by the Weierstrass-Mandelbrot (W-M) function. The fluid–solid and solid–solid contact in the lubricated fretting contact are simulated, and from these, wear and friction coefficients are determined. The effects of contact geometry on lubricated fretting contacts and lubricant on fretting wear are modelled and compared with experimental observations. Results indicate that oil lubrication reduces fretting wear and friction effectively in the less-conforming contacts but has little effect in the more-conforming contacts.