Measurement Uncertainties in Wear Rates

Measurement uncertainties are vital to discussions of differences in measured values, yet they scarcely accompany discussions of wear and wear rates in the tribology literature. In this methods article, approaches to calculate uncertainties in single-point and steady-state wear rates are presented. The analysis includes analytical treatments of uncertainties for typical macroscopic tribology instrumentation. A fully statistical treatment using Monte Carlo simulations is also presented and discussed for steady-state wear rate uncertainty analysis for an arbitrary number of interrupted measurements of volume loss.