Running-in wear simulations for surfaces from different manufacturing processes

Surface roughness plays an important role in the tribological performance of mechanical components and contact mechanics. Surface heights will be changed when a sliding wear occurs between two contact surfaces. Abrasive and adhesive wear are two basic wear mechanisms in sliding mechanical components during running-in. In order to realize the changes of surface roughness of mechanical components in these wear processes, abrasive and adhesive wear models based on observation of experiments of the sliding wear are used. The Johnson translatory system of distribution that consists of three transformations of a Gaussian distribution to describe surface height distributions is applied. Changes of some significant surface parameters such as r.m.s., skewness, and kurtosis during wear processes are predicted. Finally, the changes of surface characteristics of two wear processes are compared for surfaces with different height distributions.