Research on the Evaluation Parameters and Theory Model of Fretting Wear between Steel Wires

A 6×19 point contact hoisting rope was used as an example to develop a model to evaluate the fretting wear behavior of a steel wire pair. Thus a series of tests were performed on a fretting wear test rig constructed in our lab to evaluate the fretting wear behavior of the steel wire pair in dry friction condition. The wear depth were measured and taken as the characterization parameter to describe the fretting wear in relation to fretting time. And the integrated parameter pv value and pvt value were introduced to replace the parameters such as contact load, fretting time, and fretting amplitude so as to depict the fretting wear behavior more thoroughly and to reveal the effects of those parameters on the fretting wear behavior more conveniently. Moreover, a theoretic model was developed to examine the fretting wear behavior of the steel wire pair, by fitting the linear proportion between the integrated parameter pvt value and the wear depth. And the applicability of the model was examined by comparing with the corresponding fretting wear test results. It was found that the fretting wear depth of the steel wire increased with increasing fretting time. At a fixed contact load, the decrease of the contact stress conformed to the increase of the contact area, which was related to the increase of the wear depth with increasing fretting time as well. At the same time, the wear depth of the steel wire decreased with increasing pv value and it was almost linearly proportional to the integrated parameter pvt value. Besides, the theoretic calculation results based on the model agreed well with the experimental ones, while the model could also be applied to other fretting conditions.