An efficient method for accurately determining wear volumes of sliders with non-flat wear scars and compound curvatures

Point contact is often used in unidirectional pin-on-disk and reciprocating pin-on-flat sliding friction and wear tests. The slider tip could have either a spherical shape or compound curvatures (such as an ellipsoidal shape), and the worn tip usually is not flat but has unknown curvatures. Current methods for determining the wear volumes of sliders suffer from one or more limitations. For example, the gravimetric method is not able to detect small amounts of wear, and the two-dimensional wear scar size measurement is valid only for flat wear scars. More rigorous methods can be very time consuming, such as the 3D surface profiling method that involves obtaining tedious multiple surface profiles and analyzing a large set of data. In this study, a new “single-trace” analysis is introduced to efficiently evaluate the wear volumes of non-flat worn sliders. This method requires only the measurement of the wear scar size and one trace of profiling to obtain the curvature on the wear cap. The wear volume calculation only involves closed-form algebraic equations. This single-trace method has demonstrated much higher accuracy and fewer limitations than the gravimetric method and 2D method, and has shown good agreement with the 3D method while saving significant surface profiling and data analysis time.