Evaluation of fretting wear data with the aid of mechanism-maps

The concept of the fretting map, which identifies four separate regimes of fretting wear, namely, stick, mixed stick-slip, gross slip and reciprocating sliding, is re-assessed with respect to its experimental database. It is shown that the scatter in data is too large to draw definite conclusions regarding the boundaries of the various fretting regimes. Furthermore, the database is extended with some results relevant to fretting wear of nuclear reactor components. An alternative approach, using dimensionless parameters, namely the wear rate, the contact pressure, the sliding amplitude and the coefficient of wear, is proposed for constructing fretting maps. The proposed map is explored in reference to certain transition criteria for determining the boundaries between the different regimes of fretting. (authors)