Multiscale analysis of the effect of roughness on fretting wear

Fretting occurs when two loaded contacting surfaces are exposed to oscillatory relative movement of small amplitude. Depending on conditions such as surface finishing, coefficient of friction, normal load and slip amplitude, fretting may reduce the service life of a component by fretting wear. The effect of surface roughness on the fretting wear profile is still uncertain and may be significant. However, most of the finite element (FE) models that are used to predict fretting wear do not take it into consideration. In this paper, we propose a multiscale procedure to study roughness effect on fretting wear using FE models. In order to do that, we treat the problem in two scales: a) micro scale to analyse the effect of roughness on the contact pressure for frictionless conditions, and b) macro scale to estimate the wear profile evolution for a cylinder on plane contact configuration.