Generalized Rabinowicz' Criterion for Adhesive Wear for Elliptic Micro Contacts

This paper is devoted to an old idea suggested in 1958 by E. Rabinowicz in his paper The effect of size on the looseness of wear fragments. Rabinowicz assumed a circular shape for two asperities coming into contact and being destroyed due to relative sliding. We generalize his analysis for the case of non-circular contacts, in particular those having elliptical shape and discuss the general case of arbitrary contact shape.