On the role of intrinsic material response in failure of tribo systems

This paper studies the intrinsic material response (IMR), to energy accumulation in sliding. The underlaying hypotheses is that any material has an intrinsic limit that bounds the rate of dissipation of externally applied energy (work/thermal flux). Whenever, the rate of application of external energy is less than that of the intrinsic dissipation rate, a material catastrophic event may be avoided and vice versa. It is shown that while wear may be correlated to the structures developed in compression of a given material, the structures are correlated to the response of the material to the interaction between thermal conduction and thermal storage. This parameter in turn is influenced by the combination of strain rates and rate of entropy generation. When such analysis is applied to the sliding of pure copper, wear is found to be correlated to two parameters: the thermo-mechanical coupling factor whereas, the second represents the rate of mechanical strains to thermal strains.