Effect of the reinforcement (carbon or glass fibres) on friction and wear behaviour of the PEEK against steel surface at long dry sliding

PEEK (poly-ether-ether-ketone) is a high performance engineering semicrystalline thermoplastic. PEEK has excellent tribological behaviour, which is optimised in the specially formulated tribological composite grade. This paper presents a comparative study of wear and friction on PEEK, PEEK-CF30 (wt%) and PEEK-GF30 (wt%) against steel, at long dry sliding. A plan of experiments was performed on a pin-on-disc machine, under the following conditions pv = 2 MPa m/s (p = 8 MPa and v = 0.25 m/s; p = 2.68 MPa and v = 0.75 m/s) at the ambient temperature for a sliding distance of 15 km. PEEK-CF30 presented the lesser friction coefficient followed by PEEK. PEEK-CF30 presented the higher friction coefficient throughout all sliding distance. Both PEEK-CF30 and PEEK-GF30 have presented an excellent wear resistance relatively to PEEK while PEEK-CF30 presented the best tribological behaviour. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.