Proceedings of WTC2005:

World Tribology Congress III

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

WTC2005-63196
A FINITE ELEMENT BASED TECHNIQUE
FOR SIMULATING SLIDING WEAR
1

V. Hegadekatte* , N. Huber , O. Kraft

1, 2

Institut fr Zuverlssigkeit von Bauteilen und

Systemen, Universitt Karlsruhe (TH), Kaiserstr. 12,
D-76131, Karlsruhe, Germany.
2

Institut fr Materialforschung II,

Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe GmbH, Postfach
3640, D-76021, Karlsruhe, Germany.
*Presenting Author
Vishwanath.Hegadekatte@imf.fzk.de
ABSTRACT
Micro-machines are known to fail prematurely due to
excessive wear by virtue of their inherent high operating
frequencies and high surface to volume ratio. In order to predict
wear and eventually the life-span of such complex systems,
several hundreds of thousand operating cycles have to be
simulated. Due to the complexity of wear, the existing wear
models are insufficient to reliably predict wear based on the
material properties and the contact information. As a first step,
a technique has been developed which involves post processing
of the results from a finite element (FE) contact simulation with
a simple wear model to compute wear. The technique can be
used to simulate wear in a pin-on-disc set-up in order to
improve and verify the wear models.

tolerances and the surface quality, which is another reason for

the importance of a simulation tool that could predict the
influence of the production process and its achievable
tolerances on the lifetime of a micro-machine. The WearProcessor can be used to develop a wear model and
subsequently identify the included parameters by simulating
micro-tribological experiments conducted within the parameter
space of a certain micro-machine. With the wear simulation
tool to be discussed in this chapter, we attempt to close the gap
between in-situ wear measurements, standard tribological
experiments and the actual operation of the micro-machine [1].

1. Operation of the Wear Processor

The wear simulation tool, henceforth known as the WearProcessor is shown in Figure 1.1. The entire processes inside
the dashed line represent the Wear-Processor. The contact
geometry is explicitly modeled and appropriate material and
Geometry
Geometry
Contact
Contact Definition
Definition
Material
Material Model
Model
Boundary
Boundary Condition
Condition

Interface
Interface -- Read
Read Result
Result
(FE-Post)
(FE-Post)

Wear-Processor
Inward
Inward Surface
Surface Normal
Normal
Surface
Surface Normal
Normal Pressure
Pressure
(Contact
(Contact Pressure)
Pressure)

utotal = uelastic + uwear

Interface
Interface Post
Post Wear
Wear
Result
Result
(Wear-Post)
(Wear-Post)

Local
Local Wear
Wear Model
Model
(Archards
(Archards Law)
Law)
Wear
Wear Depth
Depth
Wear-Progress
Wear-Progress Direction
Direction

NO

NO
ss ssmax
max

Wear
Wear Depth
Depth
dSurfacedSurfaceElement
Element Height
Height
(of
(of the
the current
current
step)
step)

YES

YES

KEYWORDS: Wear, Wear Modelling, Wear Simulation, Pinon-Disc, Micro-machines

INTRODUCTION
Wear is one of the major reliability issues of micromachines. Commonly used experimental methods, like Pin-onDisc, 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-ondisc 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

Re-meshing
Re-meshing
Wear
Wear Depth
Depth as
as Boundary
Boundary Condition
Condition
Linear
Linear FE
FE Simulation
Simulation
Extract
Extract Node
Node Co-Ordinates
Co-Ordinates

FEM
FEM Simulation
Simulation
ABAQUS
ABAQUS

Viewing
Viewing the
the
Wear-Progress
Wear-Progress
in
in PATRAN
PATRAN

END
END

Figure 1.1: Flow chart of the Wear-Processor.

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 Archards
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 ps j + h j 1 , where h j

Copyright 2005 by ASME

is the total linear wear up to the jth wear step, h j 1 is the total

s j is the increment
of sliding distance for the jth (current) wear step, p is the
contact pressure at each surface node and k D is the
linear wear up to the j-1th wear step and

dimensional wear coefficient.

2. Simulation of wear in a pin-on-disc set-up

In principle, because of the generality of this method, wear on
components for any material combination can be simulated as
(a)
2RP
FEM
Model

y
FN

tD

of the wear curve for the pin is steadily decreasing, owing to

the fact that the contact conforms and so the pressure
continuously decreases (running-in).
CONCLUSION
A post processing scheme has been proposed with which
wear in 3D contacting geometries can be simulated. The results
from the wear simulation and the experimental observations are
qualitatively in good agreement. Such a simulation tool is the
first step to develop guidelines for material selection and micromachine design. Part of that is to formulate requirements on the
materials and production technology, so that a given life span
can be achieved. The simulation tool determines the loss of
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.
This will allow to study the continuous change of the
kinematics of micro-machines as well as to obtain a more
realistic stress analysis during their operating life time. Thus,
the life span can be predicted more accurately both by the
failure due to kinematics and the breakdown due to drastically
risen loads resulting from wear.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank the German Research
Foundation (DFG) for funding this work within the scope of a
collaborative research center named SFB 499 Design,
production and quality assurance of molded microparts
constructed from metals and ceramics.

Wear
Track
2RWT
2RD

(b)

REFERENCES
[1] V. Hegadekatte, N. Huber, O. Kraft, Chapter 5.4:
Development of a Simulation Tool for Wear in Microsystems
of the special edition of Micro-Engineering in Metals and
Ceramics (Ed.: H. Baltes, O. Brand, G. K. Fedder, C. Hierold,
J. G. Korvik and O. Tabata: Advanced Micro and Nano Systems
Volume 3), Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, Germany, in press.
[2] V. Hegadekatte, N. Huber, O. Kraft, Finite element
based simulation of dry sliding wear, Modelling and Simuation
in Materials Science and Engineering, 2005, 13, p. 57 75.

0.0016

Linear Wear on Pin

0.0014

Linear Wear, h [mm]

Linear Wear on Disc

0.0012
0.001
0.0008
0.0006
0.0004
0.0002
0
0

50

100

150

200

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-ondisc) 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

Copyright 2005 by ASME