Oxidational wear

The paper examines the problem of deducing the rate at which a given volume is lost between surfaces in unlubricated sliding contact, given that the type of wear is “mild”. It deals with methods of obtaining estimates of the temperature (T0) at which wearing contacts oxidize. An hypothesis of oxidational wear is then reviewed and its predictions compared with experimental wear data. It is shown that this hypothesis leads to a valid expression for the wear rate, provided one assumes that the real areas of contact oxidize at temperatures of the order of those to be expected from dynamic thermocouple experiments, and that the activation energy for such oxidation is less than for oxidation of the materials under normal static oxidational conditions.