Numerical Modeling of Fretting Wear

In this paper, a review of some techniques proposed in the literature for modelling fretting wear is presented. Fretting wear occurs when surfaces are degraded and materials are removed due to a small relative oscillatory motion between two contact surfaces. Due to the continuous change in the shape of a structure during its lifetime, the design of engineering components subjected to fretting wear is a challenge to engineers and scientists. The available predictive tools in the literature, which make use of analytical solution of the contact pressure in the first cycle ignoring the wear effect and removal of materials in the subsequence cycles, provide inaccurate results. Numerical modelling techniques such as Finite Element Analysis (FEA) can be used to model any type of structures with configuration taking into account many complicated details such as large deformation, material non-linearity, change in geometry and time integration effect. Therefore, FEA is a very desirable technique for fretting wear analysis and lifetime prediction. This review covers modelling fretting wear using numerical modelling methods, which can be divided into three main techniques, namely the FEA method, Boundary Element Method (BEM) and Finite Discrete Element Method (FDEM).