Wear simulation using an incremental sliding Boundary Element Method

In this paper, an application of the Boundary Element Method (BEM) to wear simulation problems is presented. The BEM is used for modelling the two bodies in contact. The material loss of the bodies is represented in terms of the applied load and the sliding distance and modelled using a linear wear model. An incremental method is adopted to solve the non-linear wear problem. The analysis demonstrates that the BEM is efficient for modelling the bodies in contact. The computational time remains low as only variables at the boundaries are calculated instead of the whole domain. The size of every sliding increment must be optimized in order the total CPU time to remain low and the final geometries of the bodies to be smooth, in some specified tolerances.