Test methodExperimental method for wear assessment of sealing elastomers

Elastomeric dynamic seals are components to prevent or to limit lubricant leakage in machinery. Nevertheless, they wear away under certain working conditions. Mostly, wear exists by starvation of lubricant film (two-body abrasion) and interaction with hard debris (three-body abrasion). This work aims to propose a suitable test methodology toward determining two-body and three-body abrasive wear rates of elastomers by using a TE66 Micro-Scale Abrasion Tester. In the tests, sections of silicone rubber were used. The experiments were divided in two parts. Firstly, dry runs were carried out replicating the two-body abrasion mechanism. Secondly, trials were run using two different media (contaminated oil and slurry) to reproduce three-body abrasive wear. Large viscoelastic deformations were generated in the samples and then they were considered for the wear estimation. In conclusion, the method shows advantages which make it suitable as an alternative test to obtain the wear behavior of sealing elastomers.